"In his 1990 book E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction, David Foster Wallace noted that popular culture (primarily television, of course) had begun to shun seriousness. Instead, it was more willing to flirt with the absurd, repetition, self-quotation, and other postmodernist devices. Wallace provided examples: a sitcom in which the characters are aware they are in a sitcom; a commercial where a satisfied customer admits he is merely an actor paid to appear in the film. He argued that in a self-ironic culture, any display of sincerity and humanity can either be ridiculed or viewed with cynicism. Wallace feared that post-irony was gradually erasing the boundaries between humanism and cruelty, humanity and indifference, values and cruel jokes. Did he anticipate that in the quarter-century since, post-irony would become nearly the only way to cope with our surrounding reality?"
Alexander Burenkov

""Nerve cells that fire together wire together.” As neuroscientist Joe Dispenza suggests, what we learn and repeat becomes physically embedded in our neural architecture. Thought becomes structure and experience becomes circuitry" - Peter Bencze

“How much time, discomfort, and shared responsibility are we willing to bear so that empathy does not become a mere illusion”

- Michal Pěchouček

"They both work at an impossible scale and have become intimately familiar with industrial-grade production processes. There is something primeval, almost mythical, about Maija’s way of working: the small individual taking on colossal powers. And in Bianca’s work the level of difficulty – to produce, transport, store and install these huge, living, decomposing, flesh-like curtains – means that all aspects of her practice are working against her. This is then juxtaposed with the determination and relentlessness that comes through in everything she does." - Benjamin Orlow

Through the eponymous video as well as installations, the exhibition Made in Europe interrogates questions of belonging, economic constraints, and intergenerational conflict. For more than thirty years, the artist’s father traveled to Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands, primarily to purchase Mercedes Sprinter vans and loading them with bicycles, leather sofas, or chairs at a low cost, which he then sold at a profit in Georgia, 4,800 kilometers away. The video work Made in Europe documents this strenuous journey and the process of commodifying of the items that Zauri Matikashvili’s father had transported to the Caucasus by container.

“Our trail is paved by a thin, reflective membrane — we fall into a time-trap as we cross it. We enter ourselves as we set foot "out there". It happens to us but we do it to ourselves. We freeze the future and melt the past, then in reverse. The pick-up is jumping back and forth on the nonlinear timeline of our memory.”

“When destruction multiplies all around me, I instinctively want to create a safe space around myself. To protect everything that is so dear.” - Alisa Gorshenina

“The landscape we see in the joint work of Adam Brož and Šimon Výravský, or in Ivan Theimer‘s painting, is primarily established by a system of relationships within a sprawling post-industrial organism, parts of which protrude from the ground, dive into underground tunnels, and tower into the sky on electric pylons. The mechanism of landscape design here is subject to closed laws that we are unable to decipher. At the same time, the works are separated by half a century, during which many ideas have been realized and manifested in their consequences. We fall into the mechanisms of dreamlike spheres that intertwine with dystopia, moving through them like a web of layers and structures that we discover with our eyes. Dark kerosene cleans metals, degreases and removes the dirt left behind by our footsteps.”

“…patterns are figuratively reminiscent of camouflage, but the camouflage system here is of a different kind — social, political and personal”.

Untitled solo exhibition by Protoplast, a Swiss art collective established in 1990.