Jen Kratochvil, Floor Is Lava

Hynek Alt’s newly developed works Untitled (Howl) and Untitled (Jedová Chýše/ Gifthütte, 1262-1923) follow in the footsteps of Untitled (Spejbl, ketamine), 2020 in an exploration of the societal mechanisms of coping through the utilization of mind-altering substances and its political implications on the struggle against and within capitalism.

Untitled (Jedová Chýše/ Gifthütte, 1262-1923) resurrects Prague’s oldest “den of sin” of the olden days, a pub whose history spans from the Middle Ages to mid-war modernity. Based on extensive archival research of found documentation of the state of the pub at the beginning of the 20th century (floor plans; a silent film; literary references), Alt uses CGI to reconstruct the main room of the pub in its interactively gamified model. Instead of populating it with people, Alt leaves the place as an empty scenography for a photo series of still-lives depicting highly staged residues of activities in the pub, creating a silent and mostly invisible memento of our relationship to substance use and its normalized place in our society.

Untitled (Howl) takes a different approach to the topic of the coping mechanisms we use to survive our quotidian struggles. This work rather relates to Alt’s Untitled (Lady Dee), exploring a highly pragmatic approach towards pornography as a form of a temporary remedy, the same as long-term medication of certain traits of toxic masculinity through a method of projection. In Untitled (Howl), Alt addresses another form of human delegating of our emotional and care labour, this time to pets, in this case specifically dogs. The looped video shows a CGI-rendered dog with the movements and expressions of a drunk human onto which the digital skins have been mapped. The dog either sleeps or howls, representing the on and off cycle of a human being, a worker within capitalism, available or not. The work references the endless streams of cute puppies and kitties constantly filling our social media.

Small Talks with Fire, a 4K slow motion video presenting a series of burning torches with unsynchronized fire sounds, co-authored with IVETA SCHOVANCOVÁ, presents dystopian handheld devices of possible gloomy futures. While time passes 40 times slower than reality in this looped depiction of thirty DYI torches (using a Phantom Flex4K camera, capable of shooting videos with 1000 shots per second), the projection of possible future takes place at the hyperspeed of speculation. Small talk with these fires brings out the usual suspects of reactions, from fear of harm to security of safety in the bright dancing light. While the composition, with motionless devices, following one after the other with clear cuts in between evokes directly an ambience of a computer-generated image, everything you see is shot in real life,with a very little post-production. Small Talks with Fire gives the exhibition yet another series of burning questions, as well as a navigation tool to find your bearings.

(JK)