The Ominous Paradise by Eva Fajčíková and Klára Hartlová opens up panoptic spaces where, behind the gates of Eden, shattering ruins and omnipresent decay await instead of the bliss of one’s dreams. In this zone of paradoxes, human identity endlessly shatters and reforms within a vast kaleidoscope of loneliness. Here we find ourselves in Alice’s realm behind the broken mirror, where illusion has eclipsed the sun and nothing is as it seems.

The authors unmask the treacherous Garden of Eden as a contrived psychological-mythological space that we yearn for, but which, upon closer examination, reveals its transience and elusiveness. Things are not permanent but are heading toward their end—decay here is not an accident but an imperative of existence. Ruin makes transience visible and, at the same time, embodies a memento mori. These are not the fantastical ruins of G. B. Piranesi, but rather the menacing, solitary ruins in the forgotten corners of C. D. Friedrich’s world. This mystical landscape on the border between life and the afterlife—where thought flows in place of time and space melts like wax—transforms Dalí’s concept of the persistence of memory into the persistence of oblivion.

Although the forest should be a soothing space, it has become inexplicably dangerous. It is a mysterious liminal space between civilization and wilderness, where one no longer exists and the other does not yet exist. We are gripped by dread of the landscape itself—its relentlessness and desolation. We are terrified by its vast, lonely, and perhaps even hostile expanse. Here, Fajčíková and Hartlová stage a tragedy of dark ecology according to Timothy Morton. He rejects traditional notions of a pristine, harmonious nature. Nature is, in fact, invasive, inscrutable, and unsettling. It is an inhospitable, entropic force that, in its insidious viscosity, engulfs us like the maw of a swamp from the verses of Antonín Sova: “Only the old swamp surrounds us… / The air is foul, low-growing dwarf pine and stalks / and people crawl, a wasted moment, / desires are small and goals are lost…” (Verses on the Old Swamp)

But paradise need not be merely a necropolis, from whose tombstones we piece together, like a mosaic, a history long dead. We can also understand it as a hyperobject—elusive, unpinpointable, spread across time and space, yet uncomfortably close and permanently present. The barrier between humans and the environment is crumbling—one seeps into the other and contaminates it. Windows and thresholds are passageways between different states of being, and we do not know whether we are awake or hallucinating. We are witnessing the disillusionment of a lost paradise that has unexpectedly transformed into Dante’s hell.

Baudelaire’s concept of correlation, concerning the hidden connections between the physical senses, the world, and the soul, can, like a ray of light, at least partially illuminate the black nebula of this paranormal environment: “Imagination is the most scientific of faculties, for it alone comprehends universal analogy, or what mystical religion calls correspondence.” (Letter to Alphonse Toussenel) The exhibition can thus be read as a Symbolist-inspired network of analogies and connections. Also related to Baudelaire’s aesthetics are the so-called artificial paradises, that is, altered states of consciousness accessible through psychotropic substances. Today, we could also consider psychotropic medications such as antidepressants and nootropics to be legal “paradis artificiels.” (Hartlová is a certified psychologist and psychoanalyst.)

In Fajčíková and Hartlová’s interpretation, paradise cannot be understood as a specific place, but rather as a permanently unattainable object of desire objet petit a. According to Lacan, a person never desires the thing itself, but rather something unattainable that lies beyond it. Paradise, however, can also represent a monument to lost tomorrows, haunted by the spectres of what never came to be. All that remains is a paralyzed, infinitely long present. Monotonous, empty, stagnant—and yet strangely nostalgic, like the memory of a flash of déjà vu. 

The exhibition visitor, seduced by the desire for the apple of evil, ultimately transforms from an impartial observer into a participant in this wandering. We yearn to uncover the secrets of this fallen Eden, where Adam and Eve are Lucifer and Lilith, and carnivorous flowers bloom in place of lilies. But no answers come, and only a shadow remains: “Everything goes straight ahead and / casts no shadow, / so one is lost, / shadow of a shadow, shadow in a dream, / dream of a shadow…” (Sylva Fischerová, In a Bloody Dream of Words)

curator: Kamil Princ