Jakub
Choma (*1995, Košice, Slovakia) graduated in 2023 from the painting
studio of Jiří Černický and Michal Novotný at the Academy of
Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague. Already during his studies,
he was awarded the Jindřich Chalupecký Award for 2020 – the most
prestigious Czech art prize for emerging artists. Mixing diverse
media such as painting, assemblage, sculpture, sound, and video, he
creates complex installations addressing our bodily existence within
the present digital infrastructure. Choma exhibits prolifically both
at home and abroad. His solo projects include Life
for Dummies (2017)
and Stepping
on a Lego (2018)
at Polansky Gallery in Prague, Living
the Gimmick (2018)
in VUNU Gallery Košice, Resilience (2019)in
Vilnius’ Editorial, Distant
Hum (2021)
in Prague's NoD space, Childishly
Fresh Eyes (2022)
at Zaazrak Dornych in Brno, Metallic
Aftertaste (2023)
presented at Vienna Contemporary, Cold
Cord (2024)
in Olomouc’s Basement Project and, most recently, We
Are Smelly, Atomised, Chemical, Vanilla (2024)
at Galerie Smečky in Prague. His work has been a part of many group
exhibitions across numerous countries, including shows at Basis in
Frankfurt, Galeria Municipal of Porto, and Cuchifritos Gallery in New
York, as well as several others in Stockholm, Vienna, Budapest,
Wales, Riga, and more. Choma’s pieces were also featured in several
off-site shows and are often present on online curatorial art
platforms such as O Fluxo, for which he created online
projects Wounds
Heal Faster in a Metallic Mouth (2020)
and Beta
Ground (Delirium Obstacle) (2019).
Despite his young age, Choma has already twice participated in Liste
Art Fair Basel, both alone (2021) and in collaboration with Pakui
Hardware (2019). In 2022, he was awarded a residency in New York City
with Residency Unlimited. Choma is represented by the
Bratislava-based ZAHORIAN & VAN ESPEN gallery. He lives and works
in Prague.
The work of Jakub Choma materialise the affects of exhausted technologies. Corrupted machines relentlessly parcell anonymous poetry. Resilient generators erupt contaminated, sick images imbued with secret inner lives. Volatile, disembodied battery voices both promiscuous and repressive. Compulsory productivity. Consciously oblivious. Hysteria decompose just as paranoia condenses.
Jakub Choma’s work operates at the interstice of physical and virtual, invisible abstraction and brutal materiality. Its subjects cyclically incarnates and virtualises themselves, embodying woven structure of this process’s emotions. Chaotically oversaturated with reclusive details, images and words, their distractive surface thrives between second and third dimension, concurrently compressing and expanding. Game token, fist wedge, amulet, a material piece of information, Choma’s objects as if asking for activation, perpetual modulations, immediate control. Rather an optical illusion, leaky distinction of boundaries between science fiction and social reality, a gaming labyrinth, where surface becomes skin with pores, and reality decompose and recompose into pixel-like grains. Enfleshed memory, impure, shackled and wounded, captivated in electric thrills of feedback loops, repeats and inscribes itself through sets of its own discontinuous variations. Vapid, all consuming blankness, sleep-walking in its sleep, traversed by insomniac spurts of lucidity, mesmerized flow of expansion and contraction.