Out of the Stream

Ten Comics Genres on the Fringe

Curators: Barbora Müllerová, David Schilter

Comics have always had a somewhat Cinderella-like role at LUSTR. A separate comics section in the Showcase was only created in 2020, and the main exhibitions have always been focused rather on non-sequential illustration. That’s why I decided to bring a bit more balance to our exhibition program this year and dedicate the main exhibition to this medium.

I decided to focus the exhibition, Out of the Stream, on comic genres that are not often published in the Czech Republic. Comics is simply a medium–and you can fill it with whatever you want! That means total freedom–as one of the exhibitors, German artist Anna Haifisch, says in an interview for this year’s catalog. So it would be a shame to deliberately narrow down the way we understand comics to a few of the most common themes. In our exhibition, you will find comics from genres such as fantasy, diary and reportage-documentary entries, educational, dreamlike or surrealist, horror, science fiction and queer graphic stories, sitcoms, and (perhaps a little difficult to classify) pieces of visual poetry.