In legends and folklore, the term “cambion” is used to refer to a changeling—that is, a child born of the union between a human and a demon, which was exchanged for a human child. Changelings differ from human children in such ways as having a large head and eyes, being dwarfed, being mute, restless, having a wicked temperament, being insatiable, prone to crying, or frequently ill. It was believed that they were the result of divine punishment, the evil eye, or a curse. The belief in changelings arose from the high number of physically and mentally disabled children, which was a result of poor hygiene, inadequate medical care, alcoholism, or endogamous marriages.

The exhibition’s title refers to the phenomenon of something dehumanized and unnatural. Filip Kůrka, inspired by Géricault’s portraits of the mentally ill, depicts individuals exhibiting physical, sexual, mental, and social deviations. The sight of them gives us goosebumps, but at the same time evokes compassion, for they, too, want to live and are not to blame for being born into this world, which is itself also considerably distorted.

This otherness is related to Freud’s psychoanalytic concept Das Unheimliche, which describes something that is intimately familiar and yet, at the same time, anxiously alien. In Kůrka’s work, we are confronted with the biological unsettling nature of the exposed human body, the oddities of nature, derailed sexual desire, and pathological anatomy. Much like in the board game Othello, the artist transforms pain into pleasure and death into life, where ugliness and beauty have swapped places in a chess-like castling move.

The painter transcends the “art for art’s sake” of decadence—instead of merely depicting dystopian reality, he diagnoses and analyzes its pathological symptoms. He shows the world in its truly diseased form and erects a mound of skulls for it. Not as a monument, but as a cradle for a new cult of power. He superimposes upon the biblical Adam and Eve a descendant of Actaeon and Artemis, whose monstrosity is simultaneously the source of his vitality. In his work *em* *Beyond Good and Evil* , Nietzsche warns us not to become monsters ourselves, yet Kůrka shows us in his works that we have long since become them. What other children but monstrous ones can monstrous times give birth to? The artist stands up for these changelings and provides them with a fatherly refuge on his canvases.

As Slavoj Žižek noted, psychosis, neurosis, and hysteria are not merely subjective pathologies, but rather disturbances in the fundamental relationship between the human being and the world. Kůrka has shifted these categories into the realm of art and transformed them into a Symbolist anti-ornament, whose function is not to adorn but to unsettle. Here, personality disorder is a Hamlet-like mask concealing the highest degree of mental health. Instead of illusory charm, it reveals the truth about the decline of an era, which Paul Verlaine had already sensed in his verses: “I am the Second Empire at the twilight of decadence;” (b. Ochablost)

This decay unsettles Kůrka, yet at the same time strongly fascinates him as the so-called abject. In addition to psychoanalysis, we encounter this term in the artistic movement Abject art, which utilizes unpleasant or repulsive materials, as well as in sociology, where the concept refers to individuals or groups marginalized by society. All of this is embodied in the figure of the foundling, who personifies everything that is rejected, excluded, and repressed within us. But aren’t we all, in the end, cambions who have strayed into an alienated world of spiritual emptiness, as T. S. Eliot captured it in his The Waste Land? “I think of us in a rat-run, / where the dead have left their bones.”

Curator: Kamil Princ