Through works by Czech and international artists, the exhibition explores a state in which the present engulfs both the past and the future, becoming the dominant temporal horizon — a state which can be characterised by the concept of presentism.

The past returns in the form of archives, visual records, and references, whilst the future is increasingly reduced to prediction, risk or an extension of the present state, rather than a space for genuine change. At the same time, this experience disrupts the notion of time shaped by modernity: a time which is linear, accelerating and oriented towards the future.

Instead, the exhibition presents time as layered, retrospective, stuttered, cyclical or synchronously manifold. Historical forms return in new contexts, technologies become obsolete before they have time to truly disappear, and visions of the future remain unfulfilled. They linger in the present as phantoms of possibilities which were once anticipated but never fully realised.

The selected artists work precisely with this dissolution of temporal distance. Some works appear simultaneously as artefacts of the past and remnants of a possible future, whilst others transform the digital image back into physical matter or allow materials to undergo processes duration of which defies the rhythm of instantaneous updating.

The tension between technological and material temporality thus becomes a key theme of the exhibition. Set against the speed of circulation and updating of the digital image is matter which ages, hardens, erodes or retains a physical trace. It is precisely through this difference in temporal scales that the exhibition explores a world which is constantly updating itself, yet finds it difficult to leave its permanent ‘now’.

Curator: Karolína Voleská

Author of the project: Ondřej Hübner