Dandies Loiter Through the Night

Curators: Tina Poliačková, Lumír Nykl

Artists: Jürgen Baumann, Adrian Altman, Dominika Dobiášová, Anna Slama & Marek Delong, Matyáš Maláč, Jakub Hájek & František Hanousek

In today's social mood, the line between folk horror and urban myths is as thin and crooked as the alleys of Old Prague. In the latest historical memory, we have their re-enchantment by the decline of tourists and their re-population by the lonely figures of stray night walkers and people excluded from society. The age-old notion of art as a mirror, which allows us to see lived reality in a new perspective, or the distorted glass surface can warp shapes and create illusions, is also at play. Our shared imagination is full of worlds beyond the mirror, in which everything seemingly ordinary is, on the contrary, bleak and gloomy, full of rotten and decaying processes, literally twisted and collapsed in on itself. An important part of the original romantic horror stories and gothic novels was the flip side of the same - the grotesque cringe and oppressive overturning of order. The garage environment is thus transformed into something at once more "pittoresque" and mischievously "picturesque", in the spirit of a haunted house where ordinary objects come to life: the hinges of secret passages creak and the furnishings of the dwelling come to life in the darkness in a wondrous riot of shapes and moods.