The exhibition “Afterglow”
was prepared during Artist-In-Residence Programme
in Centrum Kultury ZAMEK
Afterglow
As an entity that has undergone repeated transformation—both symbolic and material—the Castle becomes a space for intervention, dismantling, and demystification. In the course of their residency, Kama Sokolnicka and Emanuel Geisser delve into its aura and structure to extract contradictions, shadows, and forgotten narratives. Their actions may prompt us to look beyond the mere surface, at what lies dormant underneath.
Sokolnicka’s and Geisser’s practices unfold in parallel, independently at times only to intersect or overlap elsewhere, not unlike the orbits of two planets revolving around a common gravitational field. The moments of encounter, their thoughts, methods, and intuitions cross. Their work tends to derive from shared experience, conversations, or an impulse that one of them captures, processes, and then brings back in an altered form. Their works recognize each other, sharing points of reference, comparable observation strategies, and a similar sensitivity to phenomena and matter. They oscillate between the visible and the invisible, between the echoes of the past and the potential of the future. Their optics, like a measurement device, serve to arrest the fleeting and the undefined. The actions they undertake are inherently performative, like a gesture of picking or cutting something out with one’s gaze. In their approach, assemblage, collage, and montage are not just forms but also methods of knowing: a way to comprehend the world through its fragmentation and reassembly. Each element is treated equally, as both material and meaning.
In Romance languages, the word temps may denote “time” as well as “weather.” This lexical contiguity serves Sokolnicka and Geisser not only as a starting point but also provides an interpretive framework. Time and weather are both subject to constant fluctuations. They are unpredictable, may be violent or mild, and sometimes destabilizing. The artists treat history likewise—not as a linear narrative, but as an atmospheric phenomenon, full of layers, shifts, and returns. Their practice is reminiscent of psychogeographic probing of space, aiming to capture what is hidden beneath the layer of visibility in the cartography of non-obvious connections. In their objects, collages, drawings, and films, there is a recurring theme of perceiving a glow. A trace that only reveals itself through focus, after some time, at the juncture of visual and semantic information. The massifs of history and structural material contrast with the insubstantial physicality of works (a map folded into a small format, a paper loop that can be twisted into a small roll, immaterial ghosts, a small film screen).
Using honest, noble materials, the artists attempt to find the same qualities in the objects of their inquiry. Sokolnicka and Geisser treat the Castle as a body of memory, an amalgam of styles, intentions, and narratives. It does resemble a collage, a composition made up of fragments that only ostensibly constitutes a homogenous whole. Its material tissue simultaneously bears traces of the past and shows attempts to erase it. As a place, it harbours a deceptive trait. It is a château de bagatelle—a palace dressed up in fortifications. It does not serve the function suggested by its exterior, maintaining a pretence that testifies to the prestige of the founder. It is the deceptiveness that the artists wish to bring out. Their works demystify, reveal structures, expose mechanisms, and highlight contradictions. The intention is not to reconstruct the truth, but to bring afterimages to the fore. The fading trace that nevertheless can still be seen.