The group exhibition Hit the Deck was created primarily as a friendly event and an effort to reopen the space of the Únětice Granary, the former granary of Prague Castle, which after several exhibitions and cultural events gradually became a warehouse. The preparations were therefore mainly about meeting together, joining forces and the joy of rebuilding a space that deserves such care.

The concept of the project was therefore not central (it was not at the very beginning), although a connecting line of content can be traced in the exhibition, which reveals the ancient conflict and dialogue between man and technology in relation to free existence. Here, technology enters the human body, restricts free physical movement, and reflects a romantic perception of opposites that is no longer valid due to the extreme interconnectedness of technical mega-structures. On the contrary, it seems that we need to create hybrid structures and institutions that allow us to go across disciplines and navigate across political, social and human and non-human worlds.

The works on display thus reflect on the technological present from multiple perspectives: a video symbolically placed in a giant machine plays out a horror story about a visit to a foreign city as a symbol of the modern mechanised age, where, in the hyperbolic phrase “everyone plays for themselves, bastards”. Mystery stories play out in the paintings, depicting technicist landscapes without humans (or after humans?), as well as details of power lines, gigantic abstracting technological structures, or the joints of hands that look more like robotic hands… It is symptomatic that here technologies take on concrete shapes, they seem tangible – yet they too are now the victims of their own algorithms, passing information to each other somewhere in a parallel non-human universe. Today’s form of global technological platforms is indeed very difficult to grasp and many internal processes are already happening spontaneously. It’s hard (and important) to realize that humans are slowly but surely losing control of the world. Maybe that will eventually lead to saving it? Where can we feel truly free today and how to deal with the ever faster “progress”?

Another perspective reflecting the human-technology line is the subject of work, in which this ambivalent relationship is intensely inscribed. In some paintings, scenes of work in the fields are materialized; perhaps this could be a peasant village idyll, at a time when technology did not yet play a major role – but time is relentless, and today we hardly experience such an idyll anymore. Manual work is increasingly mechanised, but new jobs are emerging, such as PR managers, whose job description is conditioned by the current set-up of the internet and social networks. Is there still free work today that is independent of technology and does not lead to alienation? The fictional story of the exhibition, then, imaginatively takes place in front of the city’s black curtain, where we rush to work in our jackets, alienated from everything and everyone, and at the same time somewhere on the vast plains outside the city, where only the high-speed highway or power lines run. And where we feel just as alone.

So it seems that whether the exhibition makes references to polished car bodies or DIY carriage wrecking yards, references to big city offices or rural hot afternoons full of flies, it always turns out that the black and white duality is no longer valid in the contemporary world. So what are we to do, is there still an escape from technology? And would that even be wise? We hope that although theories celebrating technological progress have mostly proved pernicious, there are paths and hopeful crevices in which to seek safe havens and where to learn how to deal constructively with technological domination.

— Helena Todorová