Kingdom of Hex

Our global environmental and economic crisis induced by a long-term plundering or natural resources has caused that we are increasingly aware of not only the unsustainability of our system but also of the fact, that it may collapse once. In the postfactual world full of social insecurities, misinformation, and conspiracy theories, rationality is being undermined. We are a part of a society with bigger and bigger online presence and, paradoxically, weakening social bonds as endless doomscrolling of negative news and images of terror create a subconscious desire for intimacy and safety. At the same time, we are likely in the midst of another social transformation, which is slowly forming and defining our shared emotional symptoms. We can find current parallels with the Romantism movement and social reality of the 19th century, which also underwent many economic and political turns, that made the then artists desire for new aesthetics enabling them to capture the moment of escape from the old crumbling world yielding to the new one. However, if our vision of future can offer us no utopian hopes, but only bleak prospects, which language should artists use to name it? Behind the visualized desire for paradise, beauty, and fairy tale magic, darkness and terror lurk, much like understanding that any utopia is doomed to fail. The artworks picked for the Kingdom of Hex exhibition are not alike any Anthropocene art, which tries to warn us of an inevitable disaster. They take us into a world, where rationality is replaced by magic and local creatures, who just exist there and no longer represent the human capitalists plundering the environment in a never-ending purse of profit. They become a new more perceptive and sensitive kind, living in times of different reality rules. Such a world is dominated by loneliness, power of nature, timelessness, unnatural phenomena and magical rituals, fairy tale stories full of mythical heroes and magic as horror, decadence, and psychedelia make a comeback. We are an audience of the dystopian dreamy world, which reached the end of times and turns only to inward emotions and spirituality. The Kingdom of Hex exhibition presents a group of twelve artists, who belong to the youngest generation of students and recent graduates of the Czech art schools. Their work can be described as a return to Romantic tendencies, which have been gaining more and more ground in the current art world in recent years. The architecture exhibition setting was developed by the art duo of Jakub Hájek and František Hanousek, who approached the MeetFactory Gallery as a magnanimous scenography of an old watermill attic space full of grotesquely mysterious ski cottagecore house contents. It is also a very first show of the new MeetFactory exhibition dramaturgy, which partly reflects the international project Afterbirth of a Dream from 2017 by curators Cristina Gigliotti and Jan Zálešák, which was one of the first events here to include some of the artistic approaches, which became significant in following years and inspired the works of the exhibiting artists.