Childishly Fresh Eyes

Curated by Simon Kadlcak
At Zaazrak|Dornych, Brno, Czech Republic
March 03 — 17, 2022

Can we seriously continue to consider ourselves as individuals at a time when our individual identity is shattering in direct proportion to our attention? Identity – this, until recently, relatively stable quantity defined on fixed dimensions (social and local) of origin, age, occupation or culture, suddenly does not seem as unambiguous and given. In the cosmopolitan era of instant information transfer, it fragmented into a mosaic which pieces are derived from fragmentary memories of movie heroes, game worlds, pop culture icons, lifestyle influencers and childhood role models, while the number of these fragments, and connections or cracks between them remain veiled in a fog. Equally unclear is also the relationship between inspiration from real (?) experiences and what we have experienced virtually or imaginary. To make matters worse, the stones in this mosaic are constantly rearranged as liquid sands. Is transience the quality of a waking dream? In the morning you can feel like Rue from Euphoria, so during the day you are her. You have a mood for socialising in the evening, so you change into Sugar Cane for the party. At night, you turn into the worst villain, Wyatt. What will happen tomorrow? And does it really matter?

An attempt at a view through “children’s eyes” which is undistorted by a broader social context, which Jakub Choma suggests to us in the title of his exhibition, seems like an unlikely idealism in this light. However, the semantic connections which are placed next to each other in the fragmented installation just as unexpectedly as the materials, suggest what is going on with the “innocence” which we stereotypically expect whenever the word child appears. Cork boards are the grey matter into which chaotically folded images of observed representations of the world radiated in through tablet eyes seep into. Those images appear and disappear faster than those on the rewinding videotape. Do we really have to give up something to create such a view? What if we have to take something instead..?