The exhibition by Anna Slama and Marek Delong at Kostka Gallery follows on from their projects Maglev at Karpuchina Gallery (2022) and Time Has Torn the Curtain at NoD Gallery (2024), presenting the duo’s current trajectory. While still rooted in DIY aesthetics, the fantastical, and handcraft, their new, predominantly wooden objects – with their forms and smooth,polished surfaces – foreground the dynamics of motion, openly drawing on the ergonomic product-design aesthetics of the 2000s.

At the heart of the installation is a pair of chaise longues positioned opposite each other. Deliberately left empty, they do not invite the audience to sit; we can, however, lie down in them in our minds and “just look” – and yet, on a certain level, a dialogue may unfold between us. Two luminous portals open on the walls, which are at once stylised portraits of figures looking not “past the viewer” but at one another. Their faces and expressions disregard anatomy, drawing partly on the visual shorthand of digital pictograms and emojis. They do not promise escape; rather, they open passages between the present and generational memory, inscribed with millennial nostalgia for the 2000s – blurred recollections of a colourful, glossy techno-optimism and the euphoria of the rave generation, a mood we can now perceive with a degree of post-ironic distance.

The mutual gazes – those on the walls and those implied by the chaise longues – point to the riddle of communication: the insoluble dilemma of empathy, the attempt to enter another’s consciousness, which we can never directly verify. One interpretive premise here is that today’s social and cultural polarisation stems from an erosion of empathy – from a waning willingness to enter another’s perspective and step aside from one’s own assumptions. Empathy is not approached sentimentally but as a deliberate ethical practice: the capacity to suspend one’s self-evidence for a time, to admit someone else’s experience as equal, and to bear the tension of difference without immediate judgment. Cultivated and widespread, this skill can reduce friction and soften conflict; its deficit, by contrast, deepens trenches in which facts merely confirm positions chosen in advance. The exhibition thus treats empathy as a missing framework of common space – as a discipline of attention, a readiness to “give way,” and to create a field for mutual understanding.

For Slama and Delong, the 2000s are approached subjectively, without any claim to an objective analysis of social events. The turn to personal recollection and visual fragments of the past nonetheless brushes against that atmosphere of optimism and euphoria. This is not escapism, as it might seem. Rather, it is a probing and sensuous registering of the immediate present – by returning to the past, one can consider the changes that have unfolded over a given time horizon. Not systematically, but more subconsciously, as when we sink into our inner world, forget what surrounds us, and cease to ask why the mind leads us to this particular place and time. With distance, the 2000s have also become another blurred layer of content that, within the anxious field of view of the present, may take on a utopian and, in a sense, almost mythical character, extending the duo’s existing fantastical world. At a moment when former techno-optimism is collapsing, the installation can be read a s an open question: is today’s disillusion merely mourning, or a call to a new and more positive vision of the world? The artists themselves refuse to supply an answer. Instead, they usher us into an environment where we can forget all questions at once, attend to unobtrusive details – the echoes of colours and forms – listen briefly to our emotions and intuition, and set analytical thinking aside.

— Ján Gajdušek