Artist
Ines Karčáková
Ines Karčáková (*1993) is multimedia artist from Slovakia, based in Prague, Czech Republic. Her interest is in topics such as light, time, space, and disturbance of their mutual interrelationships.
She reflects on the qualities of the medium of photography through video installations in the space, which are often covered by appropriated visual material, in the long term. She is primarily interested in the changing specificity of photography - its original uniqueness is rapidly changing and today we can speak of it in terms of instability, ambiguity and untrustworthiness.
Recently, she has primarily focused on research in astrophotography, among on cosmic microwave background, or on the boundary between the rough telescope record and the aestheticized photography serving to popularize astronomy itself. Now, she is forming an arc over the schematic and romanticized visions of cosmic distances, coming back to much more terrestrial problems. Her current themes are the misbalance between the pace of technological development and its actual understanding, or the consequences of long-term neglect of environmental problems. She had several exhibitions in Slovakia, Czech Republic, but also abroad - for example in Budapest, New York or Düsseldorf.
Flowers are giving up
Corals are fading under the stress, insects are disappearing, flowers are suppressing their attractiveness, all set in the background while people lose their ability to anchor themselves in reality. What else are we willing to give up? How far does the bottom of our recklessness extend? All of these processes are happening at incredible speed as a desperate effort to appeal for help, as an answer to the geopolitical developments of the last 50 years.
The selection of photographs was taken in response to the rapid changes in nature. The main subject of my interest is the great decline of insects. Research has shown that flowers are giving up pollinators and evolving to be less attractive to them. They are evolving to self-pollinate, which would work in the short term, but may limit their ability to adapt to future environmental changes. Plants are undoing thousands of years of evolution in response to a phenomenon that has only existed for the last few decades.
The black and white photographs of insects are appropriated materials - an old large collection of negatives edited by me that I found in an antique shop. The other shots were taken gradually and are my own.
Dancing Makes You As Happy As a 2073,35 Euro Pay Rise
Hominization began approximately fourteen million years ago; Apollo 11’s crew needed four days to travel to the Moon, and it takes eight minutes till the light from the Sun reaches the Earth. One eye blink equals ten thousand transactions on electronic financial markets, and fiber-optic data transmission over a 2,500-km-long route takes twelve milliseconds, which is one-third of the speed of light. How long does it take you to get rid of the dizziness from the speed at which you live?
The world nation powers are shifting capital back to the research and development of tools and equipment for space travel after fundamental budget cuts in the 1990s as a reverberation of the tragedy of Challenger. The game also has plenty of new players from the private sector. Otherwise pragmatic billionaires dream of their pompous funerals on Mars, one day in the distant future, because they’ll live almost forever thanks to genetic manipulation, cloning or regular infusions of youthful blood. Space exploration moved far beyond its naive natal phase of little ideological skirmishes or dreaming about interstellar civilizations and jumped right into a state of ferocious conquest easily corresponding with the highest era of colonial expansion. Non only is the Moon a necessary stopover destination for any kind of journey far, far away but applications of technologies and materials developed for space travel on Earth have limitless potential. From scratchproof glass; lightweight, high-storage batteries powering all our smartphones or electric cars, memory foam and fireproof fabric or GPS, originally developed and designed for smooth navigation in outer space. On the horizon of growing investments shines a vision of fully autonomous artificial intelligence, biometric sensors, art-traffic control as well as crop fertilizers and greenhouse LEDs adapted from systems now in development for establishing otherworldly agriculture. And beyond all that lies a realm of practically boundless mining of rare earth elements and colonies of Earth originating Martians, where one for sure won’t have to worry about taxes.
To be honest, the framework of the outer space is but a mental exercise allowing for a better understanding of our current conditions. Staring the Climate crisis. Before we start digging under the surface of the Moon or on Mars, the first steps will be mining operations in the deep ocean or the arctic circle for the first time accessible by heavy machinery due to receding icebergs. The Western colonial past plays the second violin. Before conceiving a functioning governing system in a future space colony comes an urgent need to reevaluate the history of western expansions and from it resulting in a blazing state of late capitalism.
In Oskar Helcel's Under Construction, the artist works to investigate a complex of commercial and office buildings in the centre of Prague designed by Zara Hadid. The complex is surrounded by a number of controversies concerning the investor's link to corruption, so Helce summons the figure of Hadid as a mysterious guide from the world of the dead, who, through a kind of biblical commentary, posits disturbing questions about power.
Space, time and the banality of everyday life are pervading motifs in Ines Karčáková's work. In Dancing Makes You As Happy As a 2073.35 Euro Pay Rise, the artist seeks to uncover the motivations associated with the previously idealistic vision of conquering the moon, which are now having a very concrete impact on consumer life on Earth, from scratch-resistant glass to GPS.
Karina Golisová provides insight into the structures of everyday life and relationships. Her project, Like everyone else, I have to be somewhere too, delves into the concept of anchoring oneself within the intricate fabric of community life. It explores the affirmation of existence and identity within the complex interplay of shared experiences.
Barbora Bačová gives a glimpse into her intimate life through her project I am gonna live my life, and conceives working with photography much more as a process than focusing on a specific or ‘successful’ result. Many of the images could conventionally be considered unsuccessful, which appeals to the artist, and she finds her signature in this approach.
The exploration of the culture surrounding the body and its definition of the ideal form is a central theme in Nadia Markiewicz's work. In her installation DRIVE-THRU, she combines objects, photography and video to address the fundamental question of what it means to fit or not fit in with the normative formula given by society.