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Gimmick︎dsk.︎Koloman Sokol Gallery, Liptovský Mikuláš, Slovakia, 2022︎Curator: Barbora Komarová

Nowadays, we don't even know what is true.
News spreads faster than we can evaluate or examine them more deeply.
We live in an age of easily accessible information, but also of hoaxes and post-truths.
Can we even say with certainty what we are looking at? And what do we actually see?

In the past, collective dsk. (Ivana Durkáčová, Ľuboš Kotlár, Ján Skaličan) has already addressed the issue of the veracity of reproduced reality and the effort to objectively depict it through the medium of photography or video. In a new group project called Gimmick, the images are not analysed, but shifted to other contexts, scales or media, and thus play with and distort the perception of viewers. Upon closer inspection, the visually "pleasant" shot of the clouds turns into a threat of a coming tornado, and the image resembling cosmic objects transforms into ice water crystals.

Although the exhibition comments on current events, it does not do so explicitly, shockingly. Through visual cues, abstract images, fragments of nature, phenomena or the environment, it implies the coming and present crises of our time ⏤ from hoaxes, through ecological disaster to efforts to escape to other planets. The artists don't need graphs, reports or statistics ⏤ the presented images distract us inconspicuously in the same way as deviations from reality caused by current problems.
In collective as well as individual art practice, the members of dsk. work with a wide range of media, especially photography, video, sound, or objects and text. The presented Gimmick project is a complex intermedia installation that includes various approaches to photography, its materiality and execution, as well as to the moving image.

BK

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