Ordinary Life
Daniela Baráčková, Jakub Černý, David Čumalo,
Matěj Frank, Dominika Goralska,
Michal Kalhous, Ivo Sumec
10. 12. 2025 – 22. 2. 2026
opening: 9. 12. 2025 from 6PM
a guided tour with the curator: 29. 1 2026 at 7.00 PM
curators: Tomáš Knoflíček and Kateřina Štroblová
“Redemption preserves itself in a small crack in the continuum of catastrophe” [1]
“What happens when nothing happens?” Paul Virilio once asked in an interview. Can scarcity become a source of richness, and might the reduction of stimuli be a way to recalibrate our senses and our attention? After exhibitions charged with tension and thoughts of extinction, the atmosphere loosens, and through the dust settling on the ground and the wafts of smoke, the colours and shapes of a kind of reduced corporeality begin to appear—images of a world in the process of “newly” constituting itself.
How do we go on when the trajectory of our lives has shifted irreversibly and a return to the “old life” is no longer possible? Events—whether external or internal—cannot be undone. And yet, it is precisely in moments of uncertainty that small, nearly imperceptible things emerge, the things that hold our world together: the tiny details we once overlooked and that, at the moment of loss, arise as new points of orientation.
There is something invisible and yet formative in the quotidian. Henri Lefebvre writes that ordinary life is both the most banal and the most profound stratum of existence: a space where the possibility of transformation is hidden, but also the place most resistant to change. Everyday gestures—repetition, rhythms, minor acts—carry more weight than they appear to. They sustain our world, until one day we become aware of their gravity.
The objects surrounding us, too, are not mere scenery. Contemporary object-oriented ontology reminds us that things possess their own presence and duration, independent of our use of them. A mug, a chair: each of these objects bears a portion of being that escapes us, and yet it is their quiet persistence that forms the foundation of our days. The world is shaped not only by our actions, but also by the slow, material logic of things. “What does the object want to be?” asked a carver of the Aivilik Inuit as he held a piece of ivory in his hand. We would do well to think the same way and finally acknowledge that the being of things does not depend on someone observing them.
For this world to open itself to us, however, it requires our time. Byung-Chul Han warns that we live too fast to truly see. Meaning does not arise from haste, but from slowing down. Contemplation is not an escape from reality but a way of inhabiting it more fully. It is a return to dwelling—one that allows things and everyday gestures to reveal their depth.
Ordinary life is not an empty given. It is the quietest yet firmest space where our “real” story unfolds: a world that reveals itself only when we grant it time.
[1] Wolin, Richard. Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption. Berkeley, 1994.
The program of the Cursor Gallery is possible through kind support of Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, Prague City Council, State Fund of Culture of the Czech Republic, City District Prague 7,
GESTOR – The Union for the Protection of Authorship
Partners: Art Hotel Praha
Thanks: Miroslav Kubík Gallery
Media partners: ArtMap, jlbjlt.net, artalk and Radio1
