Adaptation is change, intended as a locally improving one. Adaptation is desirable, but its reality (narrative, de facto) is locked in the past tense (we can only identify it after the fact). Whereas in real time, all human action is accompanied by a narrative of its meaning.

Certainty in action, derived from placing one’s faith in past meanings that were supposed to deliver the present and the future, provides the drive to act, shielding us from the fragility of even the healthiest norms and procedures. This certainty also inevitably renders one unsuccessful in the face of changeable circumstances—obviously, to varying degrees—and this applies as well to faith in the content of this very sentence. (In theory, one may simply have good reflexes.)

Artistic activity could be considered a maladaptation, if only because of the energy it consumes. Yet judging by the facts, artistic activity has not yet ceased (it is March 2025, and the exhibition is scheduled for September of the same year). A general awareness of the resources invested in this field suggests that this is unlikely to change. Looking through a Darwinian lens at this exhibition’s situation, we cannot fully assess its usefulness. Judging by the facts, preparations are still underway. Long after it ends, we will still be unable to determine its adaptive potential.

There is always a wager.

We subject artistic creation to categorization; its credibility arises both from originality and from resemblance—its compatibility with what has historically been consumed as art. Thus, in this case too, the environment (both organic and intelligible) exerts pressure toward repetition, while simultaneously applauding what stands out. The outcome of this process, one might argue, is for example the environmental supremacy of the medium of painting.

Setting aside sentiment, gestures such as homage or reference, in light of environmental and evolutionary perspectives—beyond the often-invoked aspects such as timeless dialogue—serve an adaptive function, precisely through the repetitions they entail.

The term adaptation also applies to the transformation of artistic works so that they can be received in another medium, as in the now common and obvious example of the film adaptation of literature. Often, when we have access to the original, it is easy to feel the dissonance between a given adaptation and its source. Based on numerous contemporary experiences of adaptation, faith in the success of such an endeavor—when driven by an intention of faithful reproduction—could be called naïve. In trying to convey one thing, we end up with something else.

Processes aimed at conservation ultimately lead to the creation of something new. Faith in the value and existence of the original can always be defended—through tools such as apologetics, for example—but by integrating the inevitability of adaptive failure, we potentially open ourselves to our own experience. To the inherent clumsiness of adapting and of adaptation, and therefore of language itself—the very material from which our evaluative apparatus, along with its emanating ideas, systems, and authorities, is constructed.

The reception and experience of art or ideas—or following images that promise certain futures, such as advertisements, more or less religious teleologies, or even instruction manuals—can transform in ways inconsistent with or entirely opposed to their conscious premises for us, leading to unforeseen and nonobvious consequences. For instance: free-market capitalism, through monopolization, producing technofeudal structures that undermine all the principles of market competition.

The language of evolutionism sounds brutal. (I use it in this text more as a thought experiment than as an exposition of my own convictions.) Its brutality becomes visible in the context of everyday experience: the relations between people, the opportunism as obvious as the air we breathe, or other late-capitalist impairments that render the individual increasingly interchangeable. The drive to increase one’s own chances of survival seems to turn human relationships into caricatures—components calculating some indeterminate sums, whose meaning or purpose remains just as mysterious in the civilizational context, regardless of the beneficiaries themselves.

The above series of terse statements on my part does not arise from a need to arrive at any conclusion, but rather from an attempt to present a certain mental landscape that became the key for the collection of works comprising the exhibition Maladaptation.

The works gathered in the exhibition relate to various instances of maladaptation. They express certain “ineptitudes” resulting from how quickly assumptions taken for granted become outdated; they deal with moments when culturally entrenched solutions cease to function, with figures lost in the very pursuits they represent, with objects shifting from expected conveniences into obstacles, and with works that are themselves “faulty” adaptations of others.