Each and every time I open my computer, the screen illuminates some visually striking astronomical phenomena. As I am about to click and log in, a text appears encouraging me to further explore such wonders. And because stars and galaxies are often named by mundane events, a curious congruence arises between routine and spiritual séance. Suddenly, the sipping of morning tea blends with the designation of a star cluster named after a teaspoon. Or the quantum numbers of quarks titled analogously to charm, truthfulness and beauty precisely encapsulate the mindset you aspire to during a morning stretch. Thus, it appears that the principles of the universe may be so well hidden even in the reflections on the black button of your coat or in the ice cream which melts before you taste it. 

The exhibition I Know is about these parallels and congruences between the exact, metaphorical and mundane explorations of the everyday world. Its visual aesthetics derive from the author’s interest in sciences such as astronomy and physics (superstring theory and theories of dualities, gravitation, etc.) which have been shaped by Postmodernism throughout the last sixty years. Significantly, the advent of Postmodernism stimulated exact science to abandon the great story of objective truth in favour of the statement that the worlds we inhabit sprang from our invented theories. 

The title I Know refers to the ambiguity of such a statement as well as to the equivocal act of exploration itself. 

The second part of the exhibition is constituted out of what we tend to reflect upon through questioning laws of motion, conditions of matter, multiplication or symmetry. Nevertheless, at its end the exhibition presents us with an uncanny situation. 

Such as a situation dominated by an imaginary ‘‘spell’’. It employs a repetition of words in a manner affecting our perception of the linear passage of time. Almost as if our existence is pinned down to a timeless point and is turned powerless to reach any further. We look up at the Moon on a broom’s tip inscribed with Forever and Ever. We look around The Source – a well mounted on a wooden stairway covered by a mix of pigments and ashes. 

The previous room allowed us to perceive, to a large extent, a rational aesthetic derived from the Western scientific approaches. Whereas now we are facing rather a mystical experience alluding to hermeneutics, witchcraft and other explanations which so effectively defied objective truth. The return to the beginning of the exhibition reveals that something within us is altered. There is, in the beginning, still the same pigeon, a part of an object called Zero Point, whose faeces fall down onto the sugar cubes. Purity is changing into tarnish. An innocent mind –not biased by recent interpretations– no longer exists. Ultimately, the exhibition draws us back to a state which is crucial to both the sensation and experience of the world around – that is the state of presence. Consequently, the uncertain I KNOW is replaced by the pivotal yet so candid I EXIST. 

 

Pavel Humhal
Born: 1965/Prague, lives and works in Prague 

Pavel Humhal studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, where he received his final diploma in 1991 under the supervision of Prof. Aleš Veselý. Furthermore, he studied at the Academy de Beaux Arts in Aix-en-Provence and at the International Sommerakademie in Salzburg. In the year 1989 he was one of the founding members of the art group Pondělí. Since the year 1991 Pavel Humhal has been involved in teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts, from which he later transferred to the Department of Fine Arts at the Faculty of Architecture of the Czech Technical University and then over to the Faculty of Education at the Charles University. He now teaches at ZUŠ Biskupská in Prague. Between the years 2007 and 2009, Pavel Humhal occupied the position of chairman of the exhibition board in the Václav Špála Gallery. In the year 2008 the publishing house Tranzit published his book titled Private and Public/Osobní a veřejné. In the year 2016, at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, Humhal graduated with his doctoral thesis on ‘‘Excessive Values of Contemporary Art’’/‘‘Excesivní hodnoty současného umění’’. His artworks are in the possession of the National Gallery, the Consolidation Bank, the Prague City Gallery, the GASK and represented in a number of private collections. At the moment, he is represented by the Nevan Contempo Gallery.