Wasteland
Nela Britaňáková, Ján Gašparovič,
David Možný, Rafani, Roman Štětina
17. 9. – 23. 11. 2025
opening: 16. 9. 2025 from 6PM
guided tour: 25. 9. 2025 at 5.30PM
curators: Tomáš Knoflíček and Kateřina Štroblová
“Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit
There is not even silence in the mountains
But dry sterile thunder without rain
There is not even solitude in the mountains
But red sullen faces sneer and snarl
From doors of mudcracked houses
If there were water”
T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land
The wasteland is a state, a place and an experience. It is a space in which the meaning of former structures disintegrates, where fixed points that once shaped our image of the world vanish. It marks the boundary between what is known and what remains unnameable; between knowledge and forgetting, fullness and emptiness.
Yet despite these archetypal coordinates, the image of the wasteland in modern consciousness has crystallised above all as a resonant metaphor for civilisational crisis. Through the writings of T. S. Eliot and Theodore Roszak, the wasteland ceased to be a remote, as yet uninhabited territory, and became instead a symbol of cultural desolation: a space oversaturated with noise and drained of meaning. It came to signify a diagnosis of the modern world, a world that replaced the spiritual, corporeal and imaginative dimensions of human experience with technological rationality, whose “single vision” displaced any complex apprehension of reality and reduced existence to what is measurable, efficient and reproducible. If it works, it must be true, declared the apologist for technocracy Francis Bacon. Yet Bacon himself was among the first—albeit inadvertently and paradoxically—to glimpse the darker aspects of this “rationalised” culture: the insecurity and disquiet of the spirit, the nightmare of ecological collapse, and the dangers inherent in the domination of a technocratic apparat. It was, however, Roszak who — within the framework of early ecological critique — forged the decisive link between the devastation of the human soul and the devastation of nature. For him, the idea of a knowledge of the world being nothing more than a prelude to mastery over it provided the very impulse for this crisis. Whoever offered us such an image of nature, he argued, effectively incited us to violate it. The only way out of the wasteland, therefore, lies in recognising the interconnectedness of everything (living).
The wasteland as it is conceived in this exhibition does not represent a return to the era when Bacon and Descartes created the edifice of an epistemological distrust of nature (the foundations of which, after all, reach much further back into the Judeo-Christian tradition). Its construction here resembles a homeopathic remedy: it draws upon the very “substances” and “methods” that produced the crisis, but in a measure that carries the potential to heal. The works presented here approach the wasteland not as a condition of emptiness but as a dynamic process. They do not seek definitive naming, but instead attempt to listen for what persists after meaning has been lost—whether in desiccated relationships, crumbling structures, or the flattened language of contemporary media.
More than half a century ago, the American futurist Herman Kahn envisioned a mosaic-like society made up of countless niches and enclaves of minority tastes, desires and customs. In many respects, his vision was accurate; yet it is impossible to ignore the fact that beneath this prism of ostensible diversity, the homogenising tone of advancing globalisation penetrates ever more forcefully, carrying with it a de facto monopolistic conception of life. In Roszak’s view, we increasingly resemble the hapless protagonist of Ionesco’s play The New Tenant, overwhelmed and paralysed by the disparate accumulation of his intellectual baggage. In an increasingly opaque world, we place our trust in machines and algorithms, in the misguided hope that they will sort and resolve what we ourselves can no longer encompass. The visual strategies of the artists represented here reflect in various ways this sense of being inundated, which paradoxically creates a space of emptiness. And it is precisely within emptiness that a new mode of seeing might take shape—less assured, but perhaps all the more receptive.
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
Courtesy: Joinmusic
Media partners: ArtMap, jlbjlt.net, artalk and Radio1
