3.4. - 11.5. 2025 (opening: 2.4. 18:00)
Emilia Kurylowicz, Maxima Smith, Meii Soh, Sille Kima, Tereza Dvořáková aka VivatŽivot & David Jasek
curated by: Zuzana-Markéta Macková
graphic design: Žofia Fodorová a Šimon Vlasák
production: GAMU

The group exhibition All that is solid melts like my blush after a long shift explores the dynamics of burnout, alienation, and representation in the context of late capitalism. Through various artistic approaches, it focuses on the processes forming subjectivity within an environment where authenticity is not a given essence, but rather a constantly negotiated construct. Identity thus becomes transformed into a transaction commodity which gradually dissolves the boundaries between self-presentation and adaptation.
The neoliberal narrative of productive self-development promises success by ceaselessly working on oneself, through strategic self-regulation and optimization – but in fact, such an approach generates a permanent state of expectation. The idea of progress is based on a constantly receding, conditional horizon. The exhibition takes this paradox as its focus: burnout is not a side effect of capitalist logic, but its direct product. The body, the mind, and affective economics remain subject to rhythms oscillating between overload and emptiness, projection and disillusionment.
Instead of merely representing crisis, the exhibition explores ways in which the aesthetics of such an experience change, and the ways in which they can be visually articulated. It explores how previously subversive codes gradually become part of cultural and market-inflected environments. Gestures of resistance and critique often transform into stylized artefacts whose original power is dulled by repetition and aestheticization. Here, nostalgia is not a form of sentimental regression but rather a symptom of exhaustion where the future remains locked within recycled images of the past.
What options open up when imagination churns within a closed loop of familiar patterns? How to overcome the boundary between authenticity and performance? If the old world is falling apart and the new has not yet been born, can this liminal moment open a space for change? The exhibition does not approach such antitheses as firmly separate categories, but rather shows the ways in which they mutually overlap and merge. It focuses on liminal moments when authenticity is not just a matter of identity but also a survival strategy within the economy of affect.
Emilia Kurylowicz – Watching Porn with My Mom (Rubber Ghost), (13 min, audio)
Rubber Ghost is an anecdotal poem about one of the artist’s experiments, in which they are exposing their parents to awkward or controversial situations in order to break the conditioning, (re-)build the connection, and perhaps administer microdoses of non-normative ways of living. The artist is offering their mother to watch an art-porn film (on the set of which they worked as a talent manager). Dissecting the awkwardness of the moment, stretched into “infinity,” becomes a self-inflicted boundary test enacted through broken taboo, porn vocabulary, family memories, and reverences of paradise-like states.
Here presented as an audio work, the text is accompanied by a soundtrack made with their mouth (smacking and slurping), an ambient musical background, and the amplified sound of squishing rubber gloves.
Maxima Smith – Kopykat (Kardashian Triptych), (5 min. loop, video) In Kopykat (Kardashian Triptych)
Smith shadows the Kardashian sisters’ movements through painstaking repetition. Their projected image sits on top of the artist’s grey skin, enacting a form of moi-peau, a double-sided hide shared between Smith and the Kardashians, with the eyes and the mouth becoming abject portals to the fleshy body beneath the digitised surface. Smith shadows their movements over and over, the repetition emphasising the performativity of the moment, and through mimicry, she begins to un-do the Kardashians’ subjecthood, reinforcing the drama of femininity that is at play within these moments. The tracing of their gestures by the artist’s body becomes strangely uncanny, and as Smith’s body tires, they slip in and out of each other’s movements.
Meii Soh – We might need some sleep, (20 min, video)
A fictional essay unfolds from an unrequited love story between the self and their soul. In search of closure, photographs become portals to fantasy. As daydreams take shape, sandy landscapes reveal a secret aperture – leading deep into the camera’s lens.
Sille Kima – Brilliance, (10 min, video)
Brilliance is a wet and bright film, a scattering dream of a coming-of-age among the ruins of empires, a firing of synapses, a remembrance song, and that moment when you close your eyes in the warmth of the sun.
Starting with the fictional character of a teenager Agathe, living on the outskirts of what used to be Prague, the film blends autofiction with dreamscapes, living memories with futures hovering without time, along with archival footage from my family’s amateur film archives in Estonia, spanning throughout the changing statehoods and recording mediums from 1960s to 2000s.
Tereza Dvořáková AKA Vivat Život & David Jasek – Silence of Answers (textile, digital print)
What if the only thing we can rely on today is uncertainty? This reliquary does not contain fragments of the material world but rather those things we remain unconscious of – feelings of doubt, being adrift, opening to endless possibilities, to plasticity. It is a vessel for a sense of “I don’t know” – but not as lack but rather as a positive quality. It captures the fragility of knowledge and the awareness of its mutability. It reminds us that understanding is not the ultimate goal, but rather a constant movement between a question and its answer. The emptiness of the reliquary invites us to walk through it; it tempts us to reevaluate stable paradigms and open up to the unfathomable. The reliquary is made in pseudo-renaissance style and is decorated with techno-fossil features, connecting historical references with modern technologies, and indicating the connection between past and future. The present constantly expands, endlessly shaping new ways of life.
Tereza Dvořáková AKA Vivat Život – Life Is a Mystery (textile, embroidery, sound device)
A stone, a core, a seed – the symbolic flash disk contains the entire potential of its kind. The attractiveness of Madonna’s singing does not take us to the here and now. Our sense of introspection leads us through timeless vistas, kept in perspective by the greater whole. Layers of impossibility become a force, the essence of life.
The embroidered surface contains fragments of stories which cannot be completely deciphered. Sound is neither a part of the past nor the present but remains somewhere between, in their ungraspable interval. The stone becomes a holy item.
Zuzana-Markéta Macková – Tralalily (4 min, video)
The Tralalily video was produced for this exhibition and acts as a mood setter, initiating the audience into their expectations. It follows the life of a virtual lily imprisoned in an indeterminate environment – a club aesthetic. Uncontrollably transforming every few seconds, the flower sings, expressing her alienation and frustration from the situation.
This endless cycle of instability illustrates Gramsci’s idea that “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” The lily can never become fixed in one form, nor can it move through the threshold towards real transformation. Its existence oscillates between dissolution and constant adaptation. And lilies are present not only in the video, but also in the exhibition’s physical space. While the digital lily remains imprisoned in the cycle of endless change, her real counterparts undergo the natural process of dying.
Artist bios:
David Jasek BIO:
David Jasek is a graphic designer whose work straddles the boundary between digital design, generative design, and textile work. His work experiments with visual approaches, such as generating graphic design through coding, thus shifting the boundaries of our traditional understandings of what design can be. Typography plays a key role in his work, which he connects with motion design, allowing him to create dynamic visual projects and unique graphic concepts. He focuses on the relationship between the digital environment and the individual, explores the connection of physical and virtual identity, and searches for new methods of visual expression. His conceptions reflect technological and social changes, and his work asks about the ways graphic design is able to react to them. His work exists somewhere between visual art and design, constantly discovering new possibilities of connecting aesthetics and technologies.
Emilia Kurylowicz BIO:
Emilia Kurylowicz aka aemlx (pronounced emil) is a transdisciplinary performer, music producer, and organizer from Lodz, Poland, currently living in Berlin. Their work operates in liminal spaces between art and entertainment, playfulness and mourning, awkwardness and pathos. By subverting genres, creating alter egos, and using humor as a mode of knowledge production, they attempt to devise tools for navigating the world in the reality of system collapse. They are also a co-creator of the platform @sabbath.berlin dedicated to amplifying the voices of artists and communities from Eastern-Europe, the Balkans, Baltic regions, ex-Eastern Bloc, as well as the manager/mc of a queer wrestling platform @liminalbeastofprey____
Maxima Smith BIO:
Maxima Smith’s work, primarily based in moving image, examines the mediation of the camera, somatic processing, and is influenced by the slippage between sincerity and absurdity. She questions feminine archetypes and roles, critiquing gendered acts such as mimicry to reinforce the performativity of gender. Smith situates much of her work in the
blurred boundary between ‘on’ and ‘off-stage,’ where questions arise of how we act and perform ourselves. In parallel, Smith holds a position on the board of executives of Artists Union England. She earned her MA from the Dutch Art Institute in 2023 and obtained her BA from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2016. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, including: Crocodile Tears (Solo), Asylum Studios Gallery, Suffolk, UK (2024); Mirroring, Theater De Uitkijk, De Sloot, De Appel & Theatre Bellevue, Netherlands (2024); Crying with My Family (Solo), LADA, London (2024); Where the Moon is Up, Centrales Fies, Trento, Italy (2023); Invisible Goddess, Venice, Italy (2023); Visions in the Nunnery, The Nunnery Gallery, London (2022, 2020, 2018); Pixelache2019, Oranssi, Helsinki (2019); Ode to a Window Cleaner (Solo), The People’s Palace, London (2019).
Meii Soh BIO:
Meii Soh is a researcher, performer, writer, and dog-sitter whose work examines the intersection of human and non-human storytelling. They mediate presence and space through disassociation, speculation, poetry, and sonic materialism, re-imagining friendship, love, and parasitism as complex methods of co-existence and co-habitation. As such, Meii’s work challenges audiences to enter immersive dialogues on the obscure, camouflaged, and invisible connections between beings.
Their work has recently been presented in the context of Nieuwe Instituut, Cashmere Radio, SEA Foundation, pocoapoco, Centrale Fies, Solipsism Magazine, de appel, among others.
Meii holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Fine Arts of Lisbon and Sint Lucas Antwerpen, where they engaged in critical studies. Recently, they graduated with a master’s in Artistic Research from the Dutch Art Institute. Presently, Meii curates at GROTTO in Berlin as part of their interest in programming and eagerness to counter-individualism and capitalistic forms of gathering.
Sille Kima BIO:
Sille Kima is an artist and a musician whose work is rooted in the haptics of the sonic. Their work ascribes to the poethics of embodied practices, both of the places they are from and where they hover. She uses her vocals as her main instrument for making spatiotemporally located sound installations, live performances, radio plays, spoken word, writings, and artist films in support of a work of nonlinear and speculative worldbuilding around the crooked grammars of affection – from intimate relationships to the social and political. Recently, their work has been dealing with light – an element holding the possibility of both enormous violence and nourishing warmth simultaneously.
They have played live shows at Sabbath (90mil Berlin), UNM festival (Reykjavik), and Daylight Project (Tallinn) and collaborated for radio shows on Dublab LA, Montez Press New York, radio Alhara, Lyl radio, and Radiophrenia Glasgow. Their performances and installative work have recently been shown at Dammweg & Para/text (Berlin), Water Tower (Viljandi), Kanal (Võru), Centrale di Fies, NIDA Art Colony, and Salina, and they have been to residencies at Mustarinda, pAIR, Kordon, and NART. She also occasionally teaches at the intersection of land justice and solidarity at the Estonian Academy of Arts and is one of the founders of Kreenholm Plants in the border town of Narva.
Tereza Dvořáková (AKA Vivat Život) BIO:
Tereza Dvořáková’s textile works explore the tension between sign, text, and meaning. She uses abstract forms to create connection between imagination and the symbolic order. She translates culturally-specific references into a universal language by transforming them through materials, shapes, and words. Her work reassesses the import of cultural heritage, reflecting an eclectic present which prompts a redefinition of the status quo and fosters an active approach to the formulation of meaning. Utility is a very specific feature of her artistic work, allowing her viewers to grasp her meaning and develop a connection by means of their own identity and through personal intervention. She calls deadstock and second-hand materials “materials with history,” and they form an integral part of her style and her striving for sustainability and plasticity. She combines traditional work processes with digital tools and flat images with plastic ones, and her work presents a visual rendition of the contemporary approach to the relationship between history and the future. Tereza is a member of the Fuga artistic society.
Zuzana-Markéta Macková BIO:
Zuzana-Markéta Macková is a Czech artist and curator who lives and works between Berlin and Prague. She works with video, audio games, LARP, and immersive performance, through which she explores topics such as hypercapitalism, Eastern European identity, and conspiracy theories. Her work manipulates the viewers through humor, pop-cultural references, and a meta-modern approach. Zuzana-Markéta often critiques the authenticity of human actions during the era of late capitalism. She received an MA at the Dutch Art Institute (2021–2023), where she focused on hauntology and Lacan’s analysis of Capital. She has a BcA from FAMU (2019–2021) from the Department of Photography and the Studio of New Aesthetics. Her work has been presented at 90mil (Berlin, DE), BACO (Bergamo, IT), Centrale Fies (Dro, IT), DOCK (Basel, CH), Fotopub (Novo Mesto, SL), GHMP (Praha, CZ), Mustarinda (Hyrynsalmi, FI), and NIDA Art Colony (Nida, LT). She is a member of Display – Association for research and collective praxis, and part of the ACUD space in Berlin. She used to be a curator of Galerie Panel, co-founded the Until Further Notice experimental audio collective, and currently works with Simona Binko from the Tschechisches Zentrum Berlin on the series CCAiB, which maps the networks of Eastern European artists active on the German art scene.
Translation: Vít Bohal
Technical support: Ondřej Konrád