The Anatomy of Bureaucracy

Jiří Lindovský, Max van Olffen, Gabriela Genčúrová, Melanie Mork

OPENING TIMES: Opening: 3rd of June, 18:00
Open: 4th, 5th, 6th of June, 13:00-18:00, Summer by appointment
Poster: sharpobjects.cz

The plastic casters on a cheap chair; thin, cracked computer monitors; sinking into flatter and flatter digital processes… An opaque mirror, from which the algorithmic black hole radiates. We return office supplies to their rightful places after use. A soap dispenser fulfilling its function without touch, until the soap hits the palm of a hand. An unfulfilled desire for sterility, and disciplined bodies, and the slippery surface of a leather sofa exposed to stagnant summer air. Rising from the sofa, the sticky smack of skin on the surface brings us back to the office. The glassy gaze into a phone, the silence calming us. The lethargic airplane mode blending with the automation of a work whose goal remains out of focus.

In The Anatomy of Bureaucracy, the corporate space becomes an open framework, absorbing and gradually subordinating everyday experience to the logic of performance. These principles are not limited to the world of work, but extend into what we take home from the working day: the organisation of bodies, abilities, and capacity for attention. Portraits and organic fragments in the works of Melanie Mork (*1993) appear mined from digital identities and restored to physicality, unsuccessful phantoms, as if reality is preceding itself in reproduction. Mork develops photographs into interventionist objects and material capsules that oscillated between fixed images and phases of transformation. Representation of the body here recognises expectations, reflecting discipline as well as the impossibility of authenticity and emotional immediacy. The objects on the table are temporary configurations, in the process of being modified and rewritten, between solid and liquid states. The pictures are trapped at the end of the feed.
In his drawings and prints, Jiří Lindovský (*1948) explores the technological reality of modern life and examines the ways in which we position ourselves within these systems. His body of work spans a variety of scales. In detailed technical drawings, he examines the inner workings of imaginary computers, or the circuits of electrical synapses, recorded in a precise geometric dot grid. Some of his work resembles a microscopic point of view, an optical machine that enables the cyborg to glimpse what is usually invisible. Other artefacts evoke a sort of factory turbine whose monumentality overwhelms the viewer. The artist contrasts empty landscapes on white paper with dense crosshatching in pencil, constructing an architectural mass. Across his work, Lindovský maintains an interest in the possibilities of connectivity between different systems, machine parts, cellular structures, at the centre of all of which human anatomy is located. In the 21st century, Lindovský has turned to the alienation of office space as a medium for meditating on technological advancement. Still life in the office is illusory, strictly arranged furniture guiding trajectories, acoustic booths as microcosms in thin, whitewalled, collective corporate floors, reinforcing the omnipresent isolation of the emptied-out work wasteland.

Gabriela Genčúrová (*2002) airbrushes paintings to aestheticise the content stream. Frenzied, calculating algorithms create surreal collages of content that can no longer evoke distinction between artificially generated image and photographic reproduction. In her work, Genčúrová draws inspiration from modern meme culture as well as the outdated tropes and motifs of sci-fi/fantasy fiction. Genčúrová strives for a close interweaving of entities, their interaction resulting in an absurd and unsettling ontological dysfunction. The blurred portraits of imaginary figures, animals, or hybrid creatures seem to be trying to emerge from obfuscating mirrors, perhaps from the bottom of a pool, through a translucent membrane. Digital archetypes, surfacing in the physical world, have brought along with them the same contradictory feelings we experience wandering through online spaces.

Max van Olffen (*1996) works primarily with aluminium, which in his interpretation is liberated from technological function and acquires a specific visual autonomy. The artist combines this industrial material, cold and durable, with soft textiles, thus aiming to challenge preconceived attitudes toward technologies used for transmitting information. These interfaces, with their inverted meanings, serve not as communicative tools but as thresholds for a self-reflective gaze. At the same time, they resonate through their own absorbent surfaces. In such hushed forms, we discover our own outlines, destabilised and mutable, tied to our current position and direction of movement in space. Along with the frozen time of the internal visual code, these objects move in the tension between flow and sudden freezing.
The Anatomy of Bureaucracy reflects on the corporatisation of everyday life, the fragmentation of attention, and the constant switching between windows, interfaces, and identities. What is in focus is the figure of the human-machine connected to technological systems which simultaneously become a mirror of reality, a filter of its perception, and a means of its formation. The exhibition also emphasises female identity and the question of its variable performativity and modes of representation in the media sphere across time. It thus addresses the consequences of the internalization of the logic of digital platforms in visual culture, bodily experience, and communication habits, where every glance out the window (or into the mirror) becomes inseparable from its mediated representations. The exhibition is part of a loosely connected intergenerational cycle that explores contemporary materiality and its possible starting points.