Jáchym Šimek

Space Fabric / Wooden Particle ( Poem )

Apr 13, 2023 — Jun 16, 2023
Opening Wednesday 12. April 2023 18:00

Curator:
Mariana Pecháčková

"You're obviously still alive... Well, how lucky. Death might have spared you from those dreams."

As an organism dies, the cells that hold the DNA gradually disintegrate into smaller parts. They are often contaminated by surrounding microorganisms, making them even more illegible. Therefore, Professor Reich and his lab team created experimental artefacts, notional time capsules, in which they stored the most important information gathered during their time on Earth to save it (and, with it, the Past).

Our story unfolds many years later on the thin line between game reality and dreams when the reality is just a distant concept from the Past. The Past that does not exist - all memories of it were erased in the last extinction of the species. The protagonist⋆ of the story embarks on a journey to a remote place in the noosphere to conduct anthropological research necessary for his subsequent work to gather information about so-called radical⋆⋆ artefacts. These were to be left behind by a group of archaeologists from the Past. In the game's vocabulary, these time capsules are copies of checkpoints, places in the game where the player character appears after death. According to the rules, the protagonist must die first to get to them.

Death successfully gets him to the object of his exploration. Each individual artefact depicts a section of the Past, a collected piece of information. The protagonist soon concludes that there is a direct relationship between the objects, that one cannot exist without the other. In his diary, he notes: If we want to understand this game as a whole, we must proceed through the individual checkpoints. This is the only way to know where it is going. He concludes by writing down advice for himself: IF YOU FAIL, GO BACK TO THE PREVIOUS CHECKPOINT.

The text uses a quote from the video game S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl (2007).


⋆Jáchym Šimek (°2000) is an artist focusing mainly on sculpture and working with (non-/between) space. By subverting commonly accepted ideas about sculptural practices, his work demands a different, informed way of viewing and understanding the meaning of sculpture as a medium of such. The reliefs in the exhibition Space Fabric / Wooden Particle ( Poem ) can be seen more as artifact-recordings, created through a complex thought process, in Šimek's case, through thinking about metaverse, black holes, vortex, physical laws, and super-determinism. Šimek is a student of the Studio of Figurative Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts and is presenting his first-ever solo exhibition at the Karpuchina Gallery.

⋆⋆ Radical due to their potential to significantly alter the Past, present, and future.