Group exhibition
The ancient, endlessly layered paradox by Zeno of Elea attests the absurdity of movement which is inherently impossible. Achilles never catches up with the tortoise even though he is the fastest runner of all. Before Achilles manages to get to the point where the tortoise was, it always moves a little further, and so on ad infinitum. Thus, he never catches up with it.
In his Reconstruction series, which he has been working on continuously since 2018, Daniel Nováček gradually tries to reconstruct individual situations which say a lot about the state of our society characterized primarily by being oriented towards performance, success, and constant growth of everything and everyone. These situations are mostly based on his life or on the experiences of his close ones while the later parts of the series are partly fictional. His video installations always analyze the way we react to and relate to the social order which we are a part of. Presently, we rely on the endless flow of technological and media innovations, participating in creating of new successful projects, the constant, albeit slowing, GDP growth, and increasing productivity. The notion of a world full of unlimited possibilities is constantly glorified, which is all the more evident in post-socialist countries where a discourse based on the notions of free-market democracy and neoliberalism is intensively promoted. The philosopher Armen Avanessian, however, describes today’s globalized world as post-democratic. In fact, many decisions are made on the basis of undemocratic principles. It is very difficult for individuals to have an impact on the objective conditions of their lives. Nováček presents us with the idea that neoliberalism leads to the disillusionment of (not only) the younger generation and that it makes people want to escape to another world as they face the impossibility of finding fulfilment in their real life. The more we know about the world and about people, the more this world becomes rationalized, the more our feelings lead to disillusionment. How are we supposed to be happy when we are continuously faced with information that, at this rate, our planet is ever so inexorably closer to its demise? How are we to relate ourselves to our future?
The self-harming nature of exploring our reality manifests itself in situations when we try to, for example, artificially induce feelings of happiness using chemical substances or when we face the algorithmic and predetermined manipulability of the internet and globalized platforms by escaping into the imaginative world of novels or various forms of science fiction which give us room to slow down and enjoy some real, albeit fictional, freedom. In Reconstruction No. 5, the outcome of all previous reconstructions is materialized. The way we relate to the past, the way we experience the present, and the way we (dis)imagine the future are all summarized. Here we are locked in an endless subversive loop which can only end by fulfilling the prepper’s fantasy of the end of the world, in which the prepper (appearing in the fifth part of the series) needs none of the things he has been carefully preparing all along. In the end, prepper discovers that the post-human world does not really need humans at all.
Reconstruction No. 6, which is the main outcome of this exhibition, is a loose continuation of the previous reconstructions, perhaps an epilogue. Here we are presented with a theoretical metanarrative of the entire series as Nováček does not primarily examine individual situations but instead analyses the ways in which they are narrated. A typical story is always built to build up, we want a change to happen in it, we want the characters to evolve in some way, to grow. But in all the previous parts of the series, he has always chosen a narrative strategy which breaks out of the classic narratological forms.
Reconstruction No. 6 demonstrates a game strategy which is deliberately austere and gradually explores and reveals the characters of the two protagonists. Each of them assumes a fictional character and then they try to guess who the other is. The first is Leni Riefenstahl, a film director involved in the propaganda of Nazi Germany through her films, who argued during the post-war trials that her films depicted reality as it was and did not embellish anything, which is why she was not guilty of anything as her work was not a tool of Nazi propaganda. The other side, on the other hand, claimed that she aestheticized reality in her films, which was found to be problematic. In her character,
Nováček thematizes the ideology instilled in the stories presented to the audience; it is a theoretical outline of a narrative mode in relation to the idea which is always an integral part of it. To what extent can the idea embedded in the narration style shape the lived reality? This question seems to be answered by the second protagonist who styles herself as a thirteen-year-old Indian girl who has been gang-raped by several men. After she went to the police station in the town of Lalitpur in Uttar Pradesh, India, she was raped again by the police officers during the crime reconstruction. This story is a concrete demonstration of the lived reality (as it actually happened), an example of how stories can manipulate reality and shape it in their own image. So how do we tell stories which do not lead to even greater acceleration and accumulation of both material and immaterial capital and to the growth in both its concrete but also metaphorical sense? Is there any such a thing as a narrative which does not seem to be going anywhere?
The reflection is about the following: If a story does not have a clear ending or gradation, it does not mean that it is not a story. It is about re-contextualization; the moment we learn to consume stories not based on the idea of constant gradation and the pursuit of everything and nothing at the same time, then there will be more room for imagination, our thinking will be liberated, and it will break free from the grip of our algorithmic, over-rationalized world. The imagination does not have to be spelled out, it does not have to be presented to us in the form of a concrete science fiction story, for example. It is essential to give it space. In Reconstruction No. 6, after the problem is posed, there is an attempt to reach a solution. If we change the way we tell stories and talk about the world, we may eventually succeed in changing the reality which we are a part of. The potential for changing the future, or at least the way of thinking about it, is presented here, which is, after all, the necessary basis for the change.
In the previous parts of the series, questions are asked and are always answered or questioned as contradictions are constantly layered to bear agonizing testimony to a generation which is itself a subject to structures which it does not believe in. In the very last room, he offers us a reflection on theoretical premises which reflect a narrative mode carrying an emancipatory potential. We do not end up in a post-apocalyptic world where only further disappointment awaits (much like in Reconstruction No. 5) but are given space to think imaginatively. Nonetheless, we are no longer stuck in this meta-plane presented by Nováček; what is presented here is a blueprint for how form a society one day, which will not only think about continually moving forward, but will also begin to think about the potential for repetition, sustainability, and slowing down. Perhaps, it is not about the prepper preparing as many material objects necessary for survival within the confines of our thinking. Maybe, it is more about changing the thinking from within, redefining concepts, talking about the world differently—not just hoarding more and more information. Because the constant movement forward in this sense, in conjunction with the endless growth in general, is proving to be dysfunctional. Zeno’s paradox, after all, was refuted precisely because of thinking about the infinity of time and forward motion because the sum of an infinite series can be finite, too. For that very reason, Achilles needs to travel a finite distance to catch up with the tortoise.
The project is implemented with the financial support of the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, Capital City of Prague, State Cultural Fund of the Czech Republic and the Municipality of Prague 9.