Jakub Choma settled in Prague after studying at art school in his native Košice and continued his studies at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague (UMPRUM) at the painting studio led by Jiří Černický and Michal Novotný. From painting he moved quickly to assemblages, which he uses as segments when creating multimedia installations. Nevertheless, painting continues to play an important role in his work. He uses the knowledge acquired from this environment not only by means of its characteristic tools, such as laser engravers, CNC routers or UV printers, but also when reflecting upon the concept of the hung painting, i.e. the painting as a two-dimensional surface similar to digital graphics, in which surface and structure are layered. Early in his career it was possible to encounter sculptural paintings drawing their visual design from cartoons such as Scooby Doo. Indeed, cartoons and video games, interests he has had since childhood, have a major influence on his work. This is already evident in his first solo exhibition, Life for Dummies (2017, Polansky Gallery), which featured a simulation that included training dummies from the computer game World of Warcraft (WoW). Most telling, however, is his current diploma project Metallic Aftertaste, which combines a number of features that run through his work and will therefore receive the most attention here.
As noted above, Choma moved relatively quickly from 2D works to creating objects, assemblages and specific environments that can later be thought of as installations, as he began to incorporate media such as video and audio (video, for example, is a prominent medium in the exhibition Distant Hum at NoD). The starting point for his work was his long experience with the digital environment and his critical endeavour to use artistic language to discuss the problems of two worlds existing side by side, namely, the virtual world and the real (analogue) world. The absence of physical material in the digital sphere is replaced in the real world by a compulsive search for it, an attempt to grasp the material nature of the immaterial digital environment. And so the digital or even hanging image overflows into objects sophisticatedly combing various material, technical and semantic sources and modes of working. This type of work can be compared to the compositional principle of game culture, to DIY practices and the attempt to understand what combinatorics are still functional.
And so in Choma’s work we find a triple layer of materiality (or signs). First the use of purely physical sources such as industrial materials, plexiglass, plastic and metal sheets, scrap, rubble, pigment, chains, springs or nuts; second, the application of digital printing to these physical surfaces; and third, the insertion (most often through lasering) of words or fragments of sentences, which are used to direct the narrative of the work. An early example of such a construction is the installation Stepping on a Lego (2018, Polansky Gallery), in which we find assemblages with suggestions such as “THINK OF YOURSELF AS A PIECE OF EQUIPMENT, IF YOU LIKE”, “YOU ARE A SENSITIVE INSTRUMENT”, and “WE ARE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER”. Stepping on a Lego, one of Choma’s first solo exhibitions, is also interesting in terms of the development of his work. There remains a visible trace of working with the surface of the image, whether through the use of solid sheets of cork or directly through printmaking and painting (this is even more evident in the earlier cycle Living the Gimmick, which was presented in the Slovak space of the VUNU Gallery). All of this leads to the creation of new relationships between elements and the emergence of wholes that are not merely the sum of their parts distributed around the exhibition, i.e. the emergence of a meta-network, intertext or hyperlink. In this way, Choma ultimately subverts the very form of binary frameworks.
It is also important that, with a few exceptions, Choma does not work with readymade objects. In his conception of world building, the basic material becomes a pliable cork grain that he modifies in diverse ways. The cork’s structure resembles the pores of human skin or an elementary digital pixel, but for Choma it has another meaning: the cork sheet in the form of a bulletin board originally served as a preparatory surface right next to a telephone or computer. Choma thus imbues these sheets, pressed from waste material, with a third (and limitlessly fictive) use and puts them back into circulation. The processed cork thus becomes the basic artistic unit, a game token, and it is no coincidence that it resembles both the inventory items of the game already referred to WoW (raw materials obtained during a day’s work), as well as fist wedges. These tools, which can be seen as an extension of the human hand or palm, appear in contrast to the palm holding a smartphone, which is also an integral part of the artist’s practice (be this in the form of documenting his own work, post-production or, for example, making videos). A frequent focus of Choma’s self-videos is therefore the sight of his own palm grasping various objects and experiencing their properties and limits with an almost scientific obsession.
The set-design of Choma’s thesis work Metallic Aftertaste adopts the form of an urban construction site, though can still resemble a junkyard or landfill. Here we find the remains of human and machine labour, jute bags, excavations and dirt, the game tokens referred to above, as well as a contextually diverse network of references and links in the form of cables that are often accumulated beneath the concrete surface, like the invisible organs of the body or the hardware of a computer. What at first glance appears to be a trash aesthetic is revealed upon closer examination to be a meticulously thought out system characterised by precise procedures and the ingenious processing of materials (after all, the dump or junkyard can be understood as an inventory of materials serving the birth of new possibilities). Here, the visuality of decay is more an interrogation of techno-optimism – the metallic aftertaste in the mouth is often a symptom of health problems, an indicator of the dysfunctionality of systems beneath their apparently functioning surface.
Metallic Aftertaste is a dystopian scene that does not appear in Choma’s work for the first time: a similar format can be made out in the 2019 project Resilience. This was about a “totalising, globalising, melting chaos as the distillation of the techno-capitalist world… All of this manifests as a mutation of an alternative reality, as something that penetrates the present from a dystopian utopian future.” (https://echogonewrong.com/techno-optimism-gone-wrong-jakub-chomas-solo-show-resilience-editorial-vilni/, accessed 4 June 2023) The artist then refers to the diploma installation as a simulator, a concentration of dystopian visions in which “the visual alternatives with the haptic, the sonic, and the digital meets the material, reality meets its representation, fiction meets reality, and autobiography meets its alter ego, all of which become a parallel reality.” The artist’s work thus involves the collection of materials from different sources (personal, public, owned or appropriated), which contributes to the breakdown of dichotomies such as body and machine, culture and nature, present and future, physical and digital. For this reason, too, the virtual and the real worlds can share several features: interaction in an open and unfamiliar place; ignorance of the narrative and a lack of knowledge of how to read it appropriately, or the need for specific skills to grasp it successfully, be this through its physical materiality, tools and palms, or through control devices. A sensitivity to the “gaming” body (both real and virtual) is then manifest in Choma’s installations in the form of a purposeful evocation of a sense of control over the viewer’s attention. His constant refocusing from the whole to the detail, the volatility of the eye, can be seen as a parallel to viewing digital content. No matter how photogenic Choma’s work may be, the viewer’s physical presence in the exhibition, the unmediated perception of the artist’s work through the photographic medium, allows for different levels of experience, on the one hand via an appreciation of the strategy referred to above, and on the other via the tension the artist builds between the materials used.
The installation consists of four parts presented against the backdrop of the set-design mentioned above: two short videos played through smartphones; the Reagent Bank hanging assemblage as the core of the project with two semi-figurative systems on either side; and the Zuby / Teeth assemblage. The short videos are a polemic on the ownership and economy of gaming bodies, and in one of them the artist’s attempt to incorporate performance is evident. The latter has become increasingly important in his work in recent years and is becoming a more and more important component of the works presented (e.g. at the exhibition Gears of Life for the Jindřich Chalupecký Award in 2020 at PLATO, Choma used digital prints of his body parts on cork boards, which he then activated with live performance, transforming the aesthetic artefacts into props). The assemblage Reagent Bank creates a kind of altar with a central repository of raw materials (the name is again borrowed from WoW, whose graphic grid is used to display visually the accumulated raw materials, the items). In this way, the gaming body becomes a mere shell lacking the potential for development, and the artist thus touches upon phenomena characteristic of contemporary neoliberal society, i.e. hyper-productivity and exhaustion. The assemblage Zuby finally connects the entire installation system from the inside out imaginatively: the photographic thread in the oral cavity is replaced at a certain moment by 3D aluminium wires and network cables and the network of relationships extends from the 2D surface into space. Here it becomes clearer why Metallic Aftertaste is a dystopian simulator in Choma’s hands: it is a co-enacted apocalypse that can perhaps be reversed by seeking greater cohesion and empathy, by finding new ways and modes of coexistence. The environment of virtual games thus becomes, at least within the framework of this artistic practice, a social space standing side by side with reality, and its generational equalisation brings about an updated relation to the world.
Choma was a finalist in the Jindřich Chalupecký Award in 2020. He exhibits widely in the Czech Republic abroad, and is represented in the CZ by the Polansky Gallery. This venue also played host to his solo exhibitions Life for Dummies (2017) and Stepping on a Lego (2018). Other solo projects include Childishly Fresh Eyes (2022) at Zaazrak|Dornych in Brno and Distant Hum (2021) at NoD in Prague. He has also presented his work independently in Slovakia (Living The Gimmick, VUNU Gallery, 2018) and in Lithuania (Resilience, Editorial, 2019). He has been part of group exhibitions in Brussels, New York, Frankfurt, Vienna, Budapest, Vilnius and Stockholm. With Polansky Gallery, Choma has also twice participated in Basel, once solo (Liste Art Fair Basel 2021) and once with Pakui Hardware (Liste Art Fair Basel 2019). In the summer of 2022, he completed a residency in new York with Residency Unlimited.
