An exhibition of zines and photographs. The series I’m Learning a Language I’ll Never Speak, subtitled On the Performativity of Gender, explores identity as a process of constant learning, practice, and failure. It draws on the ideas from Judith Butler’s *Gender Trouble*, according to which gender is not a stable essence but a repeatedly constructed performance. A series of gestures, stylizations, and expectations that can never be fully fulfilled.

The photographs work with the idea of language as a system of rules that we acquire without ever truly mastering it. Just like a foreign language, gender functions here as a structure into which the subject attempts to enter: repeating, imitating, adapting. For a non-binary identity, however, this process fractures. None of the “offered languages” is fully habitable. Both genders thus reveal themselves as constructs that can be played with, but not definitively inhabited.

The series captures moments between certainty and disintegration, between a learned gesture and its failure. The body becomes a site of translation, but also of erroneous transcription. A space where norms become visible precisely at the moment they cease to function. The images thus do not create a stable identity, but rather map its constant negotiation.

I’m Learning a Language I’ll Never Speak is not about achieving fluency, but about the awareness of its impossibility. In this impossibility, however, a space opens up for one’s own, unanchored expression. A language that is neither correct nor incorrect, but constantly emerges in the process of its own experimentation.

Lukáš Procházka (*1986) studied at the PhotoGenia Institute in Brno and subsequently for a short time at the Institute of Creative Photography in Opava. Under the guidance of leading Czech photographers, he focuses primarily on conceptual photography. He exhibits, among other venues, in group shows with the Studio of Visual Communication, and has recently collaborated with other photographers on exhibitions at the RECesse Gallery and at Klub Letka. 

text: Lukáš Procházka

curator: Jakub Lang