You scroll across the screen and don't notice that, out of habit, you're repeating a reflex your body learned faster than your consciousness could register it. What if this simple gesture conceals something far more structural: a relationship between two entities that gradually shape one another? Devices have long ceased to be mere tools; they are becoming prostheses, constant companions that shape our gestures, rhythms, and habits. Things are gradually becoming our partners, and within this closeness, care and control become the same gesture, turned in two directions at once. Whoever holds is, inevitably, also held.

In Cruel Optimism, Lauren Berlant asks: "What if we keep holding on to what exhausts us precisely because the alternative is more terrifying than emptiness?" An emotional attachment to objects that promise us well-being in fact keeps us locked in a cycle of fatigue. It is this cruel generosity that makes letting go almost unthinkable.

What happens to the body when it fuses with the very thing that tames it? Karolína Auzká proposes to examine these border creatures: a collective body made of sphinx cats, on which real tufts of hair sprout in random places, signaling a refusal of the shaved, infantilized norm. This small detail becomes a slow, embedded gesture of dissent within the body. A glass sphere holds the artist's memory of a close companion. Its photographs remain locked away in someone else's cloud storage, and the memory of it now exists only in this fragile object. The cloud seemed like a convenient digital prosthesis for delegated memory — memory that, however, became the property of a platform. Reliefs depicting nail art become an icon of excessive self-presentation, bordering on the acceptance of one's own tender inner monster.

The creatures in the exhibition are as sweet as they are deceptive. Do they want to be tamed, or do they perform that desire so persuasively that the difference no longer matters?