'Room & Bored' by Emmy Skensved at Polansky Gallery, Prague

We are altogether alone. Alone together. Last night while trying to fall asleep I heard the neighbors’ baby wailing loudly as if it were in the room with me. At 3:12am my phone notified me of a message from my mother who lives in a different time zone. I forgot to change the settings to airplane mode, so the sound wrenched me out of my dreams and into my bedroom, fuzzy and grey and throbbing with confusion. Below the window, a few drunken tourists sang and stomped down the sidewalk to the next bar. No sleep, no quiet. Ariana Grande’s Into You relentlessly repeats while I brush my teeth the next morning in a bathroom with no window curtain. We are never alone, altogether alone, alone together.

How do we find solitude? Surely there must be a kind of solitude past postcard imagery of mountains and babbling brooks from remote destinations. Is it possible to find calm seclusion in spasmodic, hyper-connected urban settings, in thinly walled apartments and office cubicles? One can feel lonely anywhere, but how can welcomed moments of silence be reached, when we ourselves are never unreachable? In Room & Bored, Emmy Skensved presents an environment that encourages rest and momentary isolation in order to explore how idleness and boredom are necessary for self-reflection and the creative process. Her whispering inner monologue wanders through domestic spaces and communication channels, conceptualizing the ideal habitat for exactly this kind of mental activity – interior introspection.