All that is solid melts like my blush after a long shift
2025
3.4.—11.5.
GAMU (Prague, Czech Republic)
Curated group show
The group exhibition All that is solid melts like my blush after a long shift explores the dynamics of burnout, alienation, and representation in the context of late capitalism. Through various artistic approaches, it focuses on the processes forming subjectivity within an environment where authenticity is not a given essence, but rather a constantly negotiated construct. Identity thus becomes transformed into a transaction commodity which gradually dissolves the boundaries between self-presentation and adaptation.
The neoliberal narrative of productive self-development promises success by ceaselessly working on oneself, through strategic self-regulation and optimization – but in fact, such an approach generates a permanent state of expectation. The idea of progress is based on a constantly receding, conditional horizon. The exhibition takes this paradox as its focus: burnout is not a side effect of capitalist logic, but its direct product. The body, the mind, and affective economics remain subject to rhythms oscillating between overload and emptiness, projection and disillusionment.
Instead of merely representing crisis, the exhibition explores ways in which the aesthetics of such an experience change, and the ways in which they can be visually articulated. It explores how previously subversive codes gradually become part of cultural and market-inflected environments. Gestures of resistance and critique often transform into stylized artefacts whose original power is dulled by repetition and aestheticization. Here, nostalgia is not a form of sentimental regression but rather a symptom of exhaustion where the future remains locked within recycled images of the past.
What options open up when imagination churns within a closed loop of familiar patterns? How to overcome the boundary between authenticity and performance? If the old world is falling apart and the new has not yet been born, can this liminal moment open a space for change? The exhibition does not approach such antitheses as firmly separate categories, but rather shows the ways in which they mutually overlap and merge. It focuses on liminal moments when authenticity is not just a matter of identity but also a survival strategy within the economy of affect.
Artists: Emilia Kurylowicz, Maxima Smith, Meii Soh, Sille Kima, Tereza Dvořáková aka VivatŽivot & David Jasek, Zuzana-Markéta Macková
Curated by: Zuzana-Markéta Macková
Photos: Jan Kolský