Group exhibition
The exhibition project by two artists of different generations, Kateřina Adamová Linhartová (1977) and Mai (2000), utilizes drawings and object installations to playfully and critically address the ambiguity of seemingly self-evident social givens, standards, and norms.
The exhibition’s fundamental layout takes the form of an intergenerational social survey. It addresses the affirmingreality of social masking; mimicry into which individuals are drawn through various ways and by many mechanisms, or which they create themselves as a kind of self-defense. One of these is the shared status of representation in the online environment of social networks, where a “community” with unstable, fluid digital foundations is created. The essential, fundamental thing that establishes and creates every being in its root uniqueness is overwritten by the formal reduction of a binary-composed, alienated, and rapidly distributed surface. Sharing becomes anonymous and formalized, and in turn changes the very quality of relationships, and thus of life itself.
Both artists’ works distance themselves from this majority tendency. They base their sensitivity on the fragility of any presence within an inexhaustible number of situations. Kateřina Adamová Linhartová goes for lighthearted, though often cruel and painful self-irony. Mai, on the other hand, controls the brutality of her expression via a poetic and, to a certain extent, activist context. Both authors counter the mechanisms of external manipulation with the inner truth of the experiencing subject. Against the design and formalization of interpersonal relationships, they set the less effective, but holistic and meaningful contradictions of human condition which does not hide the fragmented nature of unpredictable emotions or the need to recognize the flip side of phenomena and experiences which belong to human interaction.
The name of the exhibition, ENDEMIC CULTIVAR, refers to the paradox and absurdity of a retouched, depersonalized world, recoding the most common experience by forcing us, through pressure and external rules, to play different roles and thus participate in the transformation of our own identity. An active artistic approach to this status quo, which is no longer just Havel‘s “temptation”, creates necessary alternatives in which the natural instincts of humanity, which have permeated time since time immemorial as stable principles, are restored and preserved.
What is “endemic” can be perceived within the project as a natural instinct to compromise and adapt to given conditions, while “cultivar” represents ways of resistance, critically re-establishing, albeit in personal, intimate, and most intimate positions, each subject‘s effort to live as freely as possible, based on the possibility of deciding for oneself and choosing one‘s own path. The endemic cultivar is a social conflict within every sensitive being that needs self-reflection to live. In other words, it is just as difficult to share things as it is not to share them and isolate oneself. Meaningful, vital movement of reflection occurs right in the relational field of these polarities.