works / Pick Up Your Phone / audiovisual installation

Communication space Školská 28, Prague

The exhibition space is divided into two interconnected parts. One of them remains almost empty, with only an occasionally ringing telephone. The other takes the form of a scenographic realisation, working with alternating light and darkness, complemented by video projections, sounding voices and a net, used here as a multi-layered symbol. It can be interpreted as a metaphor of human memory, as a web of interpersonal relationships, or as an image of a spider web in which an insect hunts its victim (in this context, one can speak of a parable of a man trapped in his own world). One of the most important interpretative levels, however, relates to the image of the communication network. Pick up Your Phone clearly refers to the distance of mediated contact mediated by electronic communication networks and to our growing reluctance to meet in the real world. In this context, the author speaks of a „virtual reality that cannot be lived“.

In exploring memory, we enter into complex and intricate webs of relationships, emotional records, associations and events that were once real or experienced as real, written deeply into our subconscious and forming an invisible matrix within it on the basis of which alone we are able to relate further. Since our relational bonds have ceased to be formed on the principle of what might be simplistically called „love“, or rather those who related to us in our childhoods were themselves already coming out of their variously split matrices, they could not fulfill our relational needs without creating voids. Those empty places, after inadequate or empty „love“ are like a hunger that grips. The emptiness left in the midst of our inner world is the void that drugs of all kinds fill. Love has been exchanged for addiction.

Stuck in a web of relationships, a prisoner in our inner world, a desire that cannot be fulfilled in any network, a virtual reality that cannot be lived.

8 March – 5 April 2011, curator: Silvie Šeborová