Baby, zoom

LUCIE ROSENFELDOVÁ AND MATĚJ PAVLÍK

Exhibition: 15 November - 25 December 2023

Lucie and Matěj are closing the cycle of exhibitions PARENTAL. They decided to search backwards for the origin until they found out that there is nothing original.

Perhaps some ghosts from various origin stories may stare at us unpleasantly in the Olga gallery. There are many stories circulating in the media around how human life comes into being. Knight sperm conquering an egg hidden somewhere in a cave, eager swimmers battling adverse conditions, a ripe egg awaiting its fate. The legends of the success and victory of one of them are strikingly reminiscent of other stories we apply to ourselves.

Seeing the egg and sperm as characters in a novel is a legacy of science older than evolutionary theory. So-called preformationists once strenuously argued for the presence of human beings alternately in both sex cells. The homunculus, a tiny little man huddled in the head of a sperm swimming toward its existence, is one of the possible ghosts left over from that theory. We evolutionists laugh at all the shrunken adults in their illustrations. And they grin back at us. How humanly ignorant is our view? To what extent are the images of science, images seen with our own eyes, really conclusive of our theories? Is the much-publicized story of the face spotted on the testicular ultrasound just another example of the fact that we only see what we look for and not what we look at?

Lucie and Matěj work with various scientific images in their exhibited works. They combine these with the motif of apophenia and optical illusions, which they understand as inherently linked to human vision. For although the scientist, be he a draughtsman of anatomy or a photographer of technical images of the body, traditionally tries to rid himself of his subjectivity, he cannot avoid frequently exchanging glances with a face that is where it should not be.