This World as We See It Is Passing Away

Comunite Fresca, Petr Dub, Martin Froulík, Matej Gavula, Marek Kvetan, Libor Novotný, Stano Masár, Janis Rafa

18. 6. – 31. 8. 2025
opening: 17. 6. 2025 from 6 PM

curators: Tomáš Knoflíček and Kateřina Štroblová
architekture: Kateřina Radakulan

In the middle of a wasteland, at a time when the world is crumbling into dust, stands a mansion. The grandiose architecture embodying power, order and continuity, is turning into a memorial space whose past is slipping into oblivion. The owner of the mansion, a symbol of superior rationality and false certainty, is unaware that the world to which he belonged is ceasing to exist. He continues to observe rituals, insists on rules, but the mirrors on the walls around him are already blind, the walls are damp, and the tapestries are turning into maps of lost worlds. The mansion serves as a metaphor for civilisational self-deception; just as it survives the collapse of its surroundings, so, too, do social institutions and discourses survive, but only as form without substance, inertia without meaning. Continuity cases to be a support. The facade of majesty becomes a stage for decline.

"This World as We See It Is Passing Away". Paul Virilio’s paraphrase of Paul of Tarsus, adopted as the title of this exhibition, for us encapsulates perfectly the eternal conflict between birth and decay. Everything visible to the eye at the moment of seeing becomes a mere lie of immediacy, an untimely inspection of a convoy of objective elements. The state in which reality disappears between our fingers at the moment we grasp it is simply an irreversible, albeit paradoxical, premise of experiencing the quotidian. The only way to disrupt it would be to stop time. However, as Virilio suggests again, in order to achieve a complete halt in the passage of time, we would need to embrace something even more absurd – to renounce utterly all action. To totally empty our conduct. There is nothing vaster than emptiness, claimed Francis Bacon. One might add, with a degree of irony, that there is nothing more disturbing.

Today it is primarily consumption – and, in a narrower sense, technology – that leads to the denial of the growing void in each of us. And because the hypermodern world can no longer tear itself away from science, the question raised by Oswald Spengler during the First World War in his book The Decline of the West resurfaces. Has our culture not already exhausted all possibilities of creativity and completed the shaping of its form, so that it can now only maintain itself in a status quo, where quality is replaced by quantity and creativity by organisation and technology?

This exhibition attempts to respond to this emptiness, not with cynicism, but with an effort to understand the silence that remains after the “fall” of the system. It collects shards, traces the gaps between signs, subverts symbols, and disrupts continuity. It works with deceleration, the fear of transience, and sentimentality. It exhibits escape, loss of judgement and the ability to live in the midst of the end – as though something was left to hold onto.

Tomáš Knoflíček and Kateřina Štroblová
transl.: Phil Jones

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

Courtesy: Slovenský institut v Praze and COLLETT Prague | Munich

Media partners: ArtMap, jlbjlt.net, artalk and Radio1