Budweis House of Art: Ales Cermak, Janek Rous: „We Do Not Name Anyone, Everyone Knows Who We Are Talking About“

Budweis, January 10 – February 11, 2017, Dům umění České Budějovice, http://dumumenicb.cz/
Czech title: Aleš Čermák, Janek Rous: „Nikoho nejmenujeme, každý ví, o kom je řeč.“

On entering the gallery, one was surrounded by a large empty dimly lit space with smoothed out walls. The most prominent element visible at first sight has been a single metal rope following the curves of the gallery wall all along. The metal wire served as the support for an audio-video cable that was twined around it and branched out to the occasional speakers and monitors fed by the signal circulating within it. The soundscape consisted of a slow English voice with a metallic echo repeating the phrases “breathe in” and “breathe out”. While the instructions related clearly to a breathing exercise meant for relaxation, the compressed machine-like quality in the semi-dark space gave it a rather disturbing and anxiety-inducing quality. One of the two monitors showed a visual representation of the breathing cycle – an orange circle slowly enlarging and shrinking in sync with the soundtrack. The other monitor was mounted above eye-height and it played back two columns of scrolling text, each telling a different story. All of this came across as a rather strict and minimalist installation. The artists added another element of an almost parodic nature – a taxidermised cat whose front legs have been replaced by sculptural “hands” from a greyish material that resembled some meditation pose. The cat was mounted on top of a Roomba vacuum robot and moving throughout the empty gallery halls. (Which made me think back to Cao Fei’s Rumba II: Nomad where the same machine moves around pointlessly through piles of construction debris in the suburbs of Beijing.)

During the visit the installation, which at first appeared as very strict and cold, slowly transformed as the time spent in the gallery passed. The physical tension of the metal rope had its sonic counterpart in the tension produced by the metallic voice. The Roomba robot itself was another manifestation of this tension, referring to a post-human world, where humans are faced with their own obsolescence that produces more anxiety than the liberation from work promised by automation. The stuffed cat, reduced to a comic interior decoration referencing a state of being that is not present anymore, appeared to be a close metaphor for a human existence in the midst of technical infrastructure, robots and software. The remainder of humaneness in the installation could be found in the stories scrolling on the screen and printed on gallery handouts, which described firsthand human experiences of individuals looking for a balance within the aforementioned circumstances.

Each of the elements of the show fit together precisely and it was clearly a result of a close cooperation of the two artists, but also of the two guest curators Zuzana Jakalova and Karina Kottova. If we consider the in-house curator Michal Skoda, then we can say that more curators that artists took part in the show. In addition, out of the two artists, Cermak is well known for his crossover into stage production, fiction and publishing. Being aware of this background provides a bit of a clue to the resulting clean and precise execution.