We Are Smelly, Atomised, Chemical, Vanilla, Succumb, Exhausted,
Delirious, Digestive, Spiritual, Laborers

Curated by: Boris Ondreička
Date: Sept 7, 2024 - Oct 5, 2024
Venue: ZAHORIAN & VAN ESPEN, Mierová 7, Bratislava
Photography: Leontína Berková, all images copyright and courtesy of artist and ZAHORIAN & VAN ESPEN 

We Are Smelly, Atomised, Chemical, Vanilla, Succumb, Exhausted,
Delirious

Curated by: Boris Ondreička
Date: Sept 7, 2024 - Jan 10, 2025
Venue:  ZAHORIAN & VAN ESPEN, Carlton Savoy Complex, Mostová 2-4, Bratislava
Photography: Leontína Berková, all images  copyright and courtesy of artist and  ZAHORIAN & VAN ESPEN



If someone at some time declares that something is a work of art, there are no longer any arguments to contest that. An art work is a two-sided porous membrane (or tablet) between the outer reality of everybody (we) and the inner reality of the artist (I). This transparent inter-space, as one may call it (because even a sheet of paper is not 2d), summons the subsequent players to an encounter. Their game has no rules. “Game” is declined as in sport, so likewise in the arts and in common entertainment. The term 3d is also widely employed in polemical fashion, to enhance the dissemination of possible
meanings.


As defined by Marisa Olson1, “post-internet” does not designate ideas of things after the ending of the internet; rather, it means thinking and art in which the internet is integrally part, though the work need not itself appear (only) online. The internet is a space. It is a still young external cultural, sensual and cerebral, metastatic and diasporic prosthesis. It is ubiquitously inseparable from the old natural body and remnant of the universe (IoE2). The internet is techlepathic3. Through it we hallucinate essential portions of reality. Its lines, wires and synapses are energetic. Its sources are metallic.  The internet is 21st century “us”. Post-internet is part of the new normal.Olson characterises it as “networked Nature”4. The prosthetic dominates the original, and also the connotative significances prevail over the original contents of words5. In extension, the internet follows on from the ancient myth of the pharmakon: the gift of writing from the god Thoth. Writing externalises memory, thus contributing to the neuroplasticity of subsequent brains. Writing changes memory to recollection. Writing is itself a sketch. It may be a medicine, drug or poison. The word as subject is an object.Phygital6 networked Nature creates an extreme multitude of stimuli. It has thereby changed humanity to a hyper-reactive information society7. Our indivisible conversations (going in the direction of all-sided conversions) put in question the validity of the distinction of outer and inner, and equally that of I and we, soft and hard, high / low, animate / inanimate, natural / cultural, human / mechanical, fictive (metaphoric, mystic...) or factual, real or virtual, truth, appearance and lie. Such normative coordinates were never entirely reliable and by now are totally banal. And anyone who wants to unfold knowledge of the world from their strict distinction can easily end up in a blind unidirectionality.


Jakub Choma chronically commands all of this (hypridity8), and his works offer us a chance to make its acquaintance. Inner and outer frequently change position in his art. The inner, concave is transposed to the outer, convex (and vice-versa). Those are two sides of the one membrane. His variable objects (or components) are, as products of conscious effort, thereby an accompanying phenomenon of the automatic absorption of phygital realities. Here we may speculate whether the medium is what we create, or whether we are media “an sich selbst”. Yes, what conditions what is no longer fixed! Things incessantly correlate bilaterally with one another. Choma fully understands this, and he declares that even a laptop has its odour and the (post-)internet is like a delicious vanilla sugar that changes to psychedelic alcohol. We are addicted to the “spirits” in question. The systemic space between objects (inter, meta dia, place of research, construction, storage, re/presentation, and even the “non-place” of transition...) is quite as important to him as the objects themselves. And thus he plays with issues of mutable position, relays of temporary autonomy, combinatorics, post/production and re/distribution, interaction and participation, sign, icon, symbol, image. The “image” in his work remainsthe larva of an imago. With him the image is an object open at the sides, and this openness appropriates the space around, and thus the (former) object itself becomes space. Compatibility and connectivity are important themes here. His multimedia work is the ongoing metamorphosis of a still levitating becoming, and not inevitably of an already grounded being. Hence to the aforementione “post” we must always add a dynamic (experimental,imaginative) “proto-“. Yes, his processual and auto-performative, animating works are syncretic prototypes that often spontaneously emerge from neuroaesthetic explorations9. Animation (from the Latin anima, “soul” – and the soul is an energy-charged gas that stinks) means revival. The atmosphere is saturated with psychotic frequencies of communication. Supermodernity has long since not been liquid, but rather, vanishingly gaseous. Everything hangs in th air.10. Stream and stream. Choma almost always adds layers of ephemeral ingredients to his (quasi-molecular) constellations, aware that even garbage has become another currency. What were once new media already have their archaeology11 and their science of restoration. The new has vanished, but it has remained diversely contemporary. Nothing stands in our way any longer. And the very thing that cools us locally is at the same time contributing massively to global warming. A wet dream of the immaterial is creating a dry material nightmare. Every second, everything is becoming something else. And “if Nature is unjust, let us change Nature!”12


Jakub Choma’s exhibition in ZAHORIAN & VAN ESPENin Bratislava is composed of two mutually complementing but independent parts. The space at Mierová is a place where visitors arrive after conscious decision and gather centrally. The space at Mostová is a
linear “non-place” 13 , a vein in a more capacious social-architectural corpus, which above all welcomes visitors to other organs throughout the body of the house, who are passing through this one. Choma’s part onMierová Street (We Are Smelly, Atomised, Chemical, Vanilla, Succumb, Exhausted, Delirious, Exhausted, Digestive, Spiritual, Laborers) is therefore constructed as a complex reorganisation (ecosystem metabolism...) postproducing projects of the last eight years. The part at Mostová (We Are Smelly, Atomised, Chemical, Vanilla, Succumb, Exhausted, Delirious 14 ) is a continuous stream (a kind of transit) of independent objects, which may evoke a film montage loop – a montage of bricolages. The two exhibitions are linked by a quasi-CCTV telemost. This relational diptych aims to exalt the qualities of variability and adaptability in Choma’s work and introduce a variety of forms of perceiving/comprehending  lines of the most up-to-date art. Simultaneously, he goes with time and against time. Hence the reading of his work(s) also is two-way.


- Boris Ondreička


1 Interview in We Make Money Not Art (March 28, 2008, online)
2 Internet of Everything = zosieťované spojenia ľudí, procesov, dát a vecí (networked connection of people, processes, data and things. -- Cisco, 2013)
3 Linking of technology + telepathy: George Dvorsky in his: Evolving Towards Telepathy (Betterhumans, April 26, 2004, online)
4 In her Networked Nature (Foxy Production / Rhizome, 2007)
5 Cf. also the elementary study The Measurement of Meaning by Charles E. Osgood (and collective, University of Illinois Press, 1967).
6 Holistic linking of physical and digital: Chris Weil (Momentum Worldwide, 2007), who points out that behind anything “non-material” (soft) one will always find a material substrate (hard).
7 Cf. also the elementary study The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States by Fritz Machlup (Princeton University Press, 1962).
8 Linking hybrid + hyper.
9 As defined by Semir Zeki in Inner Vision: an exploration of art and the brain (1999, Oxford University Press), where he links the aesthetic, emotional... with the neurobiological; and also Eric Kandel in The
Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present (2012, Random House), where he looks at the art of the Vienna Jugendstil from the
position of neuropsychiatry.
10 The most important populariser of the term anthropocene, the meteorologist and atmospherical chemist Paul Jozef Crutzen, unfolded his tracking of the drastic influence of man on Nature precisely
from a study of air.
11 As defined by Jussi Parikka in What is Media Archaeology? (Politi, 2012).
12 Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation (June 2015).
13 As defined by Marc Auge in his iconic Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (Verso, 1995), where he exalts the significance of time-space limited intervals such as corridor,
escalator, supermarket, highway, hotel, airport, ATM, computer... in the social interactivity of infrastructures.
14 We Are Smelly, Atomised, Chemical, Vanilla, as exhibited a short time previously (Galerie Smečky, Praha, 2024), was linked by Choma with his reading of Helen Marten’s story The Boiled in Between
(Prototype, 2020)

Venue: ZAHORIAN & VAN ESPEN, Mierová 7, Bratislava

Venue: ZAHORIAN & VAN ESPEN, Carlton Savoy Complex, Mostová 2-4, Bratislava