OFLUXO

A feeling of immobilizing pressure surrounds us as a mantle. We are unable to work,  and there is less and less joy in recreation. We only refuel enough to continue with  the work. Not only are we required to compete with our results, but we are also  employed as entrepreneurs of the self and creators of a media self-image. The effect  of a fuelless burn can be felt all around. Millennials, but also the youngest coming of  age generation all talk about it. We are all tired. Tired of?
One of the questions that arises is the whereabout of the evasive and mythical past,  when the flames where high, and the fuel was abundant. We can hear talks of the  promethean moment, when we were handed the flame, and a child brain recognizes  its own creative potential. There are these stories of arcadian idyll, but then it becomes  somewhat misty. At what point does the child turn into a performance hunter?
Is the constant construction of a medial image via social media the strongest factor  for making us exhausted even before we catch flame? For that is what we often hear.  If we only focused on the work itself, rather than the gimmicks that represent it, that  report it, or fake it, then a true temperature can be reached. Then we can finally glow  red hot with the desire, we are told.
Or, perhaps, the hype that surrounds all current digital media is only a smokescreen,  that in fact only builds up the image of a false god. Prometheus only brings envy if  anything into the game. The domestication of fire, the torchlight of enlightenment,  the chemical flame of the combustion engine all brought great short-term victories  to humanity. But each time the false god giggled, as new and new flammables were  thrown into the fire of dis-equilibrium. All of us are flogging ourselves, as fire always  comes as a saviour, and we somehow cannot catch flame. Something else is on fire.
Yet, what if the vision fails, and we see that there was no true burn before. Only a  smiling vision of personal progress, that plants a feeling of insufficient competence,  of not enough work, of too much undeserved leisure, which keeps us young and  not-young hostages in constant burn-out all the time.
The current collection of works of the youngest generation of artists from Bratislava  address feelings of personal and societal over-expectations, but also show moments  of out-manouvering and ignoring the false promise of Prometheus.