Curator: Karina Kottová Opening: 11th September August at 6pm Exhibition duration: 11.9. - 23. 9. 2012 Open daily 1 - 8 pm Radovan Čerevka is a remarkable young Slovakian artist. In his installations and projects he refers to the relativity of information produced by the media, especially regarding the contemporary military conflicts. In the Kostka Gallery he presents a monumental cave made of Persian carpets, entered by lines of U.S. soldiers supported by ISAF troops, who gradually disappear in it. The magical cave devouring the soldier figures evokes a clash of two worlds and certain ominousness, but also the superficiality often linked to dealing with other cultures' symbols. From the viewpoint of mythology, the cave is the image of the world, a little universe. It can stand for a battle of opposite principles, taking place in the outer world or in the human subconscious. The Platonic Cave is an allegory of inadequate contact with reality, when jut shadows of real information are mediated to us, just imperfect images. This position within the current context recalls Čerevka’s former projects pointing to the distortion of publicized reality (especially his cycle Reutersdráma, 2007). In it the author applied primarily rational approaches based on data research and analysis of depictions the media bring. In this respect, the Cave represents a detour by its special atmosphere, which does not offer an unequivocal reading. The carpets coming from the Near East and the areas of Afghanistan are a kind of luxurious reminder of a remote territory, an item that meets with other souvenirs from exotic lands in the western colonizers’ residences. In Čerevka’s installation the carpets embody, rather than the aesthetics of a “Thousand and One Night”, a hidden force, formed and concentrated in a whole whose inner logic is not accessible to an external observer. The heap of carpets reminds one of a living organism, whose throat devours soldiers degraded to standardized toys in an almost Goya-like, strange, somber mood. It is clear that no black-and-white duel between good and evil takes place in the Cave, but rather an eternal combat of deep-routed conviction and prejudice, when the other’s standpoint usually seems wrong because we are able to see it just from our own angle of view: as an imperfect shadow on the cave wall.