We walk on snow but do not feel the cold. We see smoke, flashes of red light and charred beams but no fire. And even though we are indoors, exterior elements complicate our efforts to decipher what we are experiencing. Minor distortions in reality and the sense that we aren’t really seeing what we are seeing are supported by glimpses of a familiar history that has passed through a filter of contemporary technology. We find ourselves in a space that at first glance looks wrong. We accept an invitation into an environment of subtle changes and deviations from reality.

The exhibition Polaris is a joint project of two independent artists, Lukáš Machalický and Tomáš Predka. It presents new independent works by both artists as a collective multimedia dialogue embedded in the complex exhibition environment of Liberec’s Kunst Hala and Cozy Studio.

The sensitive and minimalist design of the exhibition offers the illusion of a dystopian-romantic landscape trapped in a time vacuum somewhere between a fictional past and a fantasy future. The pairing of Machalický’s and Predka’s work updates historical artefacts, deconstructing their original functions and communicating eclectic ideas and forms of the present. The integral grasp of the gallery spaces presents an intimate conflict between exterior and interior, between reality and surrealism, encouraging reflections on the path and the goal. Natural scenographic designs and play with elements create an emotive imaginative situation that breaks away from the everyday.

The eclectic exhibition project responds to the historicizing environment of the city of Liberec, which it communicates through quotations and appropriations of various architectural elements or visual elements from the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although the two artists present their own programs, they approach the project together, and the result is a variety of architectural interventions and an exhibition design bordering on scenography and spatial installation. By making minor changes in the gallery, they complicate the nature of reality, which automatically places us in the context of a surrealist immersive environment. Dislocated exhibition panels, artificial snow, temporary fog and stylized forms of celestial constellations support the concept of travel and momentary wandering. The journey gradually turns into a destination, and a hunger for knowledge confronts omnipresent mystery and fabrication.

Lukáš Machalický presents an open series of digital prints - fictional photographic still lifes depicting a vision of historical lanterns. The motifs of light and the uncovering of dark corners remain on a symbolic level as we look at 3D scans of lanterns that currently serve as film props. A closer look offers imperfect details, stripped of their original textures, creating a functional dialogue between history and the future or between tradition and new technologies. The objects are classically arranged in wooden frames and thus become a testament to the fluidity of the current era, without being denied distinctive aesthetic qualities or the principles of post-conceptual obfuscation.

Tomáš Predka enters the dialogue with similar intentions. The artist’s painting series communicates stylized forms of fluid and almost monochromatic ornaments inspired by his childhood associated with the former Sudetenland. The abstract elements appropriate Art Nouveau ornaments extracted from architectural details. Digital reduction and semantic reconfiguration result in abstracted painterly records of movement, dynamics, and created structures. The manipulated historicizing references deliberately tread the precarious border of kitsch, which opens up new possibilities of actualization for the hanging image.