Tomáš Kajánek

Tomáš Kajánek works with photography, video and performance art. However, as is typical for many contemporary artists, these categories are not sufficient in themselves, and so we find the core of his work elsewhere. Kajánek is, most notably in one of his most recent works for the Jindřich Chalupecký Award 2018, a media archaeologist digging down through subterranean levels of material in order to emphasis the ideological processes within which they are formed. However, he draws on media culture in his previous work, not only as inspiration, but also as a material source. He is especially interested in user generated content from a variety of social media and forums.

The material that Kajánek exhibits is mostly presented as a finished product rather than being refashioned into something with a clear political agenda. This absence of authorship and the political is deceptive. For instance, in his project for the Jindřich Chalupecký Award 2018 the very transfer of a video from YouTube into the context of the art world represents a sovereign gesture by which the artist surrenders the right to the creation of new artefacts and only opens the door to their re-contextualisation. In the art world, which like the world of capital demands a great deal of competitiveness, this intensive production and (self)presentation is already an ideological declaration in itself. The two topics that most often overlap in his work represent not only a commentary on social phenomena, but also criticism of the ability of art to reflect and influence these phenomena.

The two appropriated videos of Automated YouTube Click #1 (2018) and Automated YouTube Click #2 (2018) highlight a state of the world in which media distributed catastrophes being played out in real time not only surround us but dull our moral sensitivity by virtue of their ubiquitousness to such an extent that the hyper-real environment in which we live no longer bothers to recognise the difference between an image of reality and one of fiction. In such a world, according to Kajánek, new narratives do not have to be created. It suffices to bring objects from one environment to another. These objects not only retain their intensity, but are enriched by other levels of critical reading.

What role does the artistic institution and its visitors play in the world of medialised ends of the world? At the exhibition Cvičení hromadného neštěstí / Mass Disaster Training (2018) the artist explores this still unrecognisable boundary between reality and fiction with appropriated videos featuring collective training in self-defence in the event of a global catastrophe or military conflict. This then prompts the question of to what extent the sometimes hysterical medialisation of these problems is our own work.

Works such as Evidence of Performance (2014–2015) and Fotografie pořízené automatickou spouští, kde jsem měl deset vteřin na to se v obraze schovat / Photos taken using the self timer, where I had ten seconds to hide myself in the image (2014) link up to the aesthetics of conceptual and performative tendencies as we know them from the latter half of the last century. The first work featured a conflict provoked by a discussion without ordinary conversational restraints, e.g. the attempt to persuade Roma people that they are salt of the earth in a station pub. A self-portrait with black eye and a caption is then the laconic documentation of this and other such efforts. The second work features a series of classical landscape photographs, the title of which informs us that “the artist is hidden somewhere in the photograph”. This cycle interrogates the question of the presence/absence of the artist in their work. The context cannot ever be divided from the text and the intention of the artist will always be concealed in the images. A trace of the artist remains in the work, though he or she be hidden.

The eight-hour video That’s All For Today (2014), in which Kajánek’s hand rests immobile on a table, is another way of asking whether it is possible to lie in art. However, this time the viewer is invited to join in the dialogue. In order to discover whether the video genuinely fulfils its intension and does not contain any loops or cuts, the viewer would have to sit through the entire eight hours. In That’s All For Today the artist offers his time for the viewer’s. Kajánek investigates the relationship of the artist and the viewer and the ethics of art as something that is not separated from ordinary life, but intimately bound up with it.

Martin Vrba, Místo utopie v současné umělecké praxi, Artalk 2019.
https://artalk.cz/2019/02/13/misto-utopie-v-soucasne-umelecke-praxi/ Vojtěch Märc, Tomáš Kajánek, Art+Antiques 2018.
http://www.artcasopis.cz/clanky/tomas-kajanek Anna Remešová, Tomáš Kajánek: Všichni jsme neustále vystavováni násilí, Artalk 2018.
artalk.cz/2018/10/17/131425/ KAJÁNEK, T., ŻMIJEWSKI, A. Speaking (of) Monuments. In Performing Public Art. 2015, p. 214–221.  Performing Public Art, výstavní katalog Essl Award 2015, výstavní katalog