The categories that have long shaped our understanding of the world are no longer serving as solid foundations. The boundaries between truth and fiction, male and female, natural and artificial, living and non-living, body and image, or private and public have become so permeable that they have lost much of their original authority.

The modern conception of a stable subject and clearly distinct categories has long been challenged by a number of thinkers: Judith Butler through the concept of gender performativity, Donna Haraway through her reflections on the hybrids of nature, technology, and the body, and Bruno Latour through his critique of the traditional division between nature and culture. The present thus does not confront us with the simple question of how to return to certainty, but rather how to live in a world where unambiguous categories are becoming inadequate tools for orientation.

The works featured in the exhibition function as seismographs of this new era. They capture subtle shifts in the body, memory, landscape, image, and identity: illness transforms our relationship to our own bodies; the face dissolves in the media cycle; nature disappears and returns as an artificial substitute; death encounters technological apparatus, and femininity and queer identity are composed of fragments, roles, wounds, and gestures of care. Here, photography is not a tool for confirming reality, but a sensitive medium that allows us to explore the boundaries of our perception.

New Liquidities therefore does not present a single interpretation of the world, but rather a set of strategies for surviving this fluidity: through humor, ritual, image, care, material, memory, corporeality, or fantasy. The exhibition asks what remains when old boundaries cease to apply, and whether it is precisely in their dissolution that a new space for sensitivity and imagination can emerge.

Curator: Kateřina Sýsová