Text: Anežka Jabůrková
Within a world shaped by capitalist systems rooted in long histories of hierarchy, extraction, and exclusion, Conditions of Coexistence stages an environment that mirrors the difficulty of navigating a looming reality structured by anthropocentric and binary modes of thinking. The works of Luiza Furtado, Lilla Gombos, and Sáro Gottstein, set within Klára Dolníková’s atmospheric scenography, amplify the complexity of this reality and the inadequacy of the tools we have been equipped with to understand, categorise, and navigate. There is no silver lining and no clear path through. The exhibition emphasises uncertainty, contradiction, and instability. In a world shaped by advertising, social media, artificial intelligence, and accelerated flows of information, Conditions of Coexistence argues that there are no simple shortcuts. Instead, the exhibition pleads with us to find new ways of coexisting.
Luiza Furtado, Lilla Gombos, and Sáro Gottstein work across different media, each drawing on distinct traditions of artistic practice. Gombos uses oil painting, moving between large and small formats; Gottstein presents a video installation documenting a performance alongside objects used within it; and Furtado works with textile sculpture and textile painting.
In the hands of Lilla Gombos, painting becomes a tool for producing an uncanny and unsettling experience. In the series Musca Domestica, the enlarged and fragmented forms resist immediate recognition, leaving the viewer unable to clearly distinguish what they are looking at. Her painting techniques further intensify this instability: blurred, overlapping, and disorienting surfaces can produce an almost physical sense of dizziness. Simultaneously, Gombos creates tension between the elevated status of oil painting, particularly portraiture, historically associated with wealth and prestige, and the subject she chooses to depict: the common housefly, a species usually despised, ignored, pushed to the margins, and treated as disposable. By granting it the scale, attention, and painterly care traditionally reserved for more valued subjects, Gombos shifts attention toward nonhuman life and questions anthropocentric hierarchies of significance. The insect meshes installed in the space further intensify this idea, exposing how easily beings placed outside or below the human sphere can be excluded, devalued, and killed.
Like Gombos, Sáro Gottstein works with animal imagery, while directing our attention toward different concerns. In Gottstein’s Domovina, the pigeon-like performers reflect how we can perceive an adversary as radically different, despite an unsettling resemblance between them and ourselves. The pigeon embodies the disdain we often feel toward something we dismiss without ever getting to know it. This tension between othering and similarity is underlined by the mirror present throughout the performance, further connecting Domovina to Naomi Klein’s idea of the doppelgänger. At the same time, Gottstein playfully oscillates between popular culture and contemporary art, drawing on true crime as a genre associated with leisure and entertainment and translating its narrative conventions into a twenty-minute wordless performance. The two nearly identical performers are caught in a conflict after discovering a heart. As they try to find out what happened, they begin to compete to win the spectators over to their side. As the tempo intensifies, so does the pressure to choose, yet the performers’ striking similarity makes them increasingly difficult to distinguish. Instead of persuading through arguments, facts, and findings, they communicate only through whistling sounds produced through their beaks, appealing to affect rather than reason. This growing confusion creates an uncanny sense of disturbance; the pressure to decide quickly echoes the fast-paced, stressful conditions of contemporary life, in which we are often pushed to make decisions based on emotion.
That same pressure to choose, consume, and produce under these conditions is an underlying concern of Luiza Furtado’s work; however, she translates this tension into something more tangible. Drawing on her background in design, she approaches these questions through the textile industry, examining how materials, images, and products are used to shape desire, identity, and ideas of comfort or care.
Traditionally, textiles have been associated with feminine labour and softness. This association becomes complicated by the fact that much contemporary fabric is produced through the petrochemical industry. Synthetic fibres are incorporated into many of the garments we wear, yet once produced, they become extremely difficult to get rid of. These contradictions between softness and industry, care and contamination culminate in the soft sculpture Eggshell Casts. As we look more closely, the form of a pregnant body begins to emerge, surrounded by layers of seam-sealing tape. Pregnancy, the womb, and reproduction are brought into relation with plastic production, waste management, and the textile industry. Stretchy garments marketed as supportive and adaptable to the changing pregnant body are themselves often made from synthetic materials. In the paintings Potion Mechanics and Silent Prescription, these materials reappear as textile-like forms within the body, while blue passages evoke water as a route through which synthetic waste enters and circulates through both bodies and ecosystems.
The work draws attention to the unsettling relationship between plastic and reproductive care. Research into microplastics and pregnancy has raised concerns about their presence in the body and their possible effects on reproductive health, including premature birth. This creates a disturbing contradiction with technologies of care: incubators and other medical devices used to protect premature babies are themselves dependent on plastics and petrochemical materials. Luiza’s work therefore asks us to look more closely at the promises made by advertising and by the enormous availability of textiles within contemporary society. Garments promise comfort, support, adaptability, and care, yet decisions made throughout their production also generate waste that remains long after the product has been consumed. What is marketed as a solution for the individual body can therefore become part of a much larger system of extraction and contamination that ultimately returns to affect bodies and ecosystems.
An ominous feeling runs through all three positions, underscored by the dim, atmospheric lighting of the space. Across all three works, the viewer is left uncertain about what is good and what is bad. This tension is especially present in Gottstein’s work, where the two performers are surrounded by newspapers suggesting an overwhelming flow of information that is ultimately reduced to noise, making it difficult to decide what to believe or whose side to take. In Gombos’s paintings, we struggle to recognise what is directly in front of us, while in Furtado’s work, familiar materials and products reveal consequences that are not immediately visible. Together, the works unsettle the images, habits, and assumptions through which we make sense of the world. They ask us to reconsider the tools we have been taught to use to understand and categorise it—tools shaped by histories of hierarchy, exclusion, and anthropocentric thinking. In doing so, they reveal that the systems and images shaping our everyday lives do not necessarily operate in our best interests.