Artist: Lucia Sceranková 

Title: Drinking Salty Water Does Not Help

Venue: ZAHORIAN & VAN ESPEN, Bratislava

Curator: Jen Kratochvil

How far are we from the protagonists of the Ancient Greek myths? Or how close they actually are? All those characters, all those stories.
You see Mark Zuckerberg delivering a bleak burst of repetitive statements in front of the congressional committee. You watch a life stream from a QAnon demonstration. You attend yet another Zoom birthday. You see your reflection on the darkened screen through all those fuzzy fingerprint marks. When the light comes to life from within, all the unanswered notifications explode in your face. You see Sisyphus, Narcissus, Oedipus or Echo. You observe them over a seemingly bottomless abyss of past histories. And time suddenly flattens – a time warp, a wormhole, or a simple mirror. It is you lying by the lake, staring into the water, perceiving but yourself. A YouTube ASMR clip’s soft sound calms you down for a brief moment and gives back an illusory anchor, right before you chug your tenth coffee this morning and dive deep into the impenetrable yet all-consuming void of the screen. It feels only like an echo when more and more beeps keep reverberating in the background of your conscious perceptions. All those mythical figures are but you. Pre-coded. Pre-determined. Trapped forever. How pathetic. So what. 

***

Lucia Sceranková’s “Drinking Salty Water Does Not Help” places its viewers in the middle of physically manifested and severely magnified screens whose material character oscillates between pure light, fabric, and plexiglass. Presented series of videos could be a subversion of your daily Instagram feed, same as animated paintings or unconscious mental projections excavated from a glimpse of a memory stored during a deep sleep state. Even though everything seems to be closely connected with visual representations of a human being in the digital realm, the core of the project lies in its direct contradiction, a tendency to find a way to renew our privacy, intimacy, and closeness in the physical world. Despite an overgrown general need for mediated exposure, there always seems to be a hidden layer of urge for real-life contact and interaction. Shouting for intimacy online often feels like drinking salty water to quench your thirst. There might be a way to find a balance through. How? You have to know.

Sound Mix: Max Vajt
Exhibition installation: Dušan Dobiaš
Special thanks to Marián Grolmus, Zuzana Sceranková and Lily Hall.