About project
The exhibition The Red Pill was created in collaboration with Signal Festival and curator Pavel Mrkus. The selected artists draw from geometric and physical orders, constructivist tendencies in Czech art, perhaps best illustrated by Josef Hlaváček’s legendary exhibition The Poetry of Rationality. Through highly precise technological apparatuses, mathematical algorithms, computer codes and mechanisms, they bring a pure poetic formula about the goodness of the world.
There is a key scene in The Matrix when Morpheus gives Neo a choice between a blue pill and a red pill. The blue represents conformity within an illusory system; the red is a journey beyond safety, a path of knowledge and a call to activism. Red represents Neo’s choice and conscious acceptance of the role of shaman, mediator between worlds. The shaman’s privilege to see beyond the membrane of illusion, to make unexpected connections, to transcend physical laws, is redeemed by struggle. All this is done in the interest of saving the hope of natural life. The proximity of so many aspects of the practice of the shaman and the artist is remarkable and probably not accidental. When society is confronted daily with the urgency of negative news of its gradual or almost irreversible end, it asks its shaman to save it, or at least to offer hope, to offer light. Artists who use light as a technique, meaning or symbol have a similar gift.
Lukáš Dřevjaný, Pavel Holeček, Pavel Korbička, Richard Loskot, Ivo Louda, Jan Poš, Petr Pufler, Michal Pustějovský, Tereza Severová, Jiří Suchánek, Karim Tarakji.
The exhibition programme will be extended during the Signal Festival. More information is available at trafogallery.cz.
