(S)měna

The group exhibition (S)měna intertwines the theme of currency with the theme of work. Through the exhibited works, it seeks to reveal the invisible processes conditioning our everyday lived reality. At the very beginning of our reflections on the circulation of physical or symbolic currency was the story encoded in the relief of a modified Crown coin by Artur Magrot. We can consider it a pretext for a joint conversation between the artists invited to the exhibition, a starting point for thinking about the relativisation of commonly shared values. Magrot’s relief appears in Pragovka Gallery hanging as a three-dimensional object. It becomes an imaginary uncharted map, a landscape model which can become the subject of a metaphorical reading. Its surface is dynamically modelled. It is the result of an irrepressible elemental action – the cash flow taking everything in its path with it, leaving behind deep troughs and washed away sediments. Sometimes, it spills out in innumerable streams, other times, it is like silent water grinding the banks and its effect is only manifested in time. It is this uncharted map that becomes the subject of our joint research. We become cartographers of the invisible. We focus on the movers and shakers of our steps, who, though we often forget it, define the trajectories of our movement, define our routines and personal or collectively shared desires on a daily basis. In their works, the authors critically scrutinize money and its circulation as well as our position as co-actors in the cycle of production and consumption. They force us to think and rethink. They call for the establishment of a new social contract. Some of them, like Magrot, delve deep beneath the surface of lived, often liminal experiences to inquire into the possibilities of our functioning within a system that is not always entirely friendly to us. Others, like Zahoranský or Vosecký, do essentially the same thing, only in a completely different way. They contribute to the dialogue in the form of straightforward comments through messages encoded in a catch-all acronym. In his works oscillating between painting and object, Petr Dub pushes the theme into an abstracted plane. His work teases us with its visuality. However, there are also often reflections on problematic aspects of our functioning within social structures behind some of their creations. Janek Rous observes our actions against the backdrop of the passage of time which seems to be the only unwavering constant in this discussion. In a horizon incompatible with our experience, he gradually layers and abrades the mass of the stone which became the object of interest for Alena Kotzmannová in her video called Horizontal Fall; the stone being a proxy symbol to which our laborious efforts, all our hopes and aspirations, are directed, which can be thwarted in an instant by an external factor, in this case, a steep stock market crash. The works presented in the exhibition refer to the material and immaterial nature of money. Money and its circulation operate at the level of relationships. They depend on the interactions between people. They are catalysts for processes that have a fundamental impact on our own lives and the functioning of society. In our current digital era, however, they are increasingly disappearing from circulation. Perhaps this fact also prevents us from understanding the mechanisms in which we find ourselves. The effort to uncover them and to better understand the situation in which we find ourselves is our common motivation and our sole objective.