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'Ten Years Night' by Jakub Jansa at Fotopub Project Space (Mihelic’s GAS STATION), Ljubljana

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CLUB OF OPPORTUNITIES Ep. 6: Ten Years Night

The science-fiction writer Aldous Huxley once wrote in a Brave New World, “great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.” 

In Jakub Jansa’s ongoing series “Club of Opportunities”, currently on view at the Fotopub Project Space in Ljubljana, Slovenia, the young Czech artist presents the sixth iteration of an immersive multi-channel art project that explores polyphonic ideas about the nature of reality in the 21st century, albeit with a silent twist. 

Instead of bombarding viewers with overly didactic wall labels and long convoluted texts, the video installation is composed of narrators who debate  the nature of reality from the perspective of a celery root, their voices overlapping and bleeding into the exhibition space like an echo-chamber of white noise. 

Several videos of the seminal Czech philosopher Kamil Nabelek are juxtaposed to sounds and videos of shoes tapping. The result being an amorphous blob and complete sensory overlap. If you’re looking for any sense of objective truth here, you won’t find it. Instead, all that is left is an apt metaphor for the current state of social and political debate today, or perhaps, the lack thereof.

The project takes partial inspiration from the genre of the epic. Yet, while Homer’s Odyssey compiled oral histories into an antiquated form of early human, social and political history, Jansa’s project accelerates through nonlinear arrangements of space and time like a creeping rootstock that rhizomatically shoots and spreads. 

Above all, Jansa’s project invokes an emancipatory biosphere set against overlapping voices, angst ridden, near-future and uncertain scenarios. All of which seem to gesture towards an ever more plausible extinction event, one that threatens the entirety of human, plant and animal life, and, crucially, whether or not the ontology of a celery root would be able to survive such disastrous calamity. 

— Dorian Batycka

26.9.19 — 29.10.19

Fotopub Project Space

'ABSINTHE', Group Show Curated by PLAGUE at Smena, Kazan

'Pupila' by Elizabeth Burmann Littin at Two seven two gallery, Toronto

'Auxiliary Lights' by Kai Philip Trausenegger at Bildraum 07, Vienna

'Inferno' by Matthew Tully Dugan at Lomex, New York

'Зamok', Off-Site Group Project at dentistry Dr. Blumkin, Moscow

'Dog, No Leash', Group Show at Spazio Orr, Brescia

'Syllables in Heart' by Thomas Bremerstent at Salgshallen, Oslo

'Out-of-place artifact', Off-Site Project by Artem Briukhov in Birsk Fortress, Bi

'Gardening' by Daniel Drabek at Toni Areal, Zurich

'HALF TRUTHS', Group Show at Hackney Road, E2 8ET, London

'Unknown Unknowns' by Christian Roncea at West End, The Hague

'Thinking About Things That Are Thinking' by Nicolás Lamas at Meessen De Clercq,

‘Funny / Sad’, Group Show by Ian Bruner, Don Elektro & Halo, curated by Rhizome P

'Don’t Die', Group Show at No Gallery, New York

'Almost Begin' by Bronson Smillie at Afternoon Projects, Vancouver

'I'll Carry Your Heart's Gray Wing with a Trembling Hand to My Old Age', Group Sh

'hapy like a fly' by Clément Courgeon at Colette Mariana, Barcelona

'Fear of the Dark' by Jack Evans at Soup, London

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