Jáchym Šimek has a long standing interest in illusiveness, theatricality, and the staged quality of environments as ways of looking at reality. His concern is not primarily with theatre as a medium, but with a principle that spills over from it into everyday life. The moment when people step into roles, adopt certain forms of behaviour, and move through environments that predetermine those roles, without this ever being acknowledged as play. It is precisely this unacknowledged moment of play that is central to his work.

In his diploma project, he draws on a set of environments that carry strong, predetermined expectations: a courtroom, an opera house, a church, an MMA arena. He is not interested in these as specific places, but as frameworks within which a particular type of behaviour unfolds. Individual scenes emerge from these frameworks, for Šimek, what matters more than any single narrative is the creation of situations in which such structures begin to break down or lose their function. In his work, the courtroom becomes a space that has lost the capacity to decide, while the opera house ceases to function as a place of concentrated attention and loses its autonomy.

His working process combines digital modelling with physical realization, certain scenes were first developed in a 3D environment before being translated into physical form through mould-making and casting. The installation also includes standalone figures that are not directly tied to individual reliefs, yet share with them a certain mood and mode of existing in space. These figures function as bearers of symbolic roles, recognizable through the gesture or attribute they carry, a gesture of the hand presenting them to the viewer, which can read simultaneously as an offering and as a form of imposition.

Šimek’s work draws on Guy Debord’s concept of the spectacle and its later readings by Tom Bunyard, Marco Briziarelli, and Emiliana Armano, as well as on Jean Baudrillard’s theory of simulacra. Yet his reliefs and figures do not inhabit a state following the disappearance of the referent, rather they capture the moment just before it, a moment that never fully resolves whether it has occurred or not. It is precisely this irresolution, the instant when an environment still functions but ceases to be self-evident, that matters more to the artist than any clear-cut conclusion.