With his multilayered work, conceptual artist Miloš Šejn (1947) enters the world of phenomena in order to communicate the core and contours of human presence in a new and distinctive way.

These are not only phenomena associated with the complex perception of place and time on their most general and essential levels. Often, it is also an exploration of incidental relationships that are hidden, obscured, or layered over time, relating to human memory, personal history, factual events, and mémoire involontaire. A particular phenomenon of this kind is the family memory of the sculptor Hana Wichterlová (1903–1990), who maintained a studio in Újezd, not far from Josef Sudek's studio, and whom Miloš Šejn knew personally as a child.

The exhibition layout for the Josef Sudek Studio creates an intersection of place, time, memory, and
media traces (photographs, videos, drawings). Sudek's photograph of Wichterlová's sculpture, entitled Black Head, plays a significant role here. Her closed eyes serve as the trigger for events, with inner vision as their main referent — the vision that connects the hiddenness of thought with the face of what is seen. Whether it be a human face, a face encountered as a metaphor for a place, a window, or a view. This theme is also reflected in the title of the exhibition, COUNTENANCE / ZATVÁŘÍ. The Czech neologism precisely captures the territory where any fleeting experience transforms into a timeless, lasting essence — an essence that does not disappear by being forgotten but, once formulated, continues to exist forever within a different order of validity.