Markéta Slaná – Congratulations, You Have Just Lost!
June 28, 2025 — August 16, 2025
with performance “Swagnotes on Hope” 15 August 2025
Hunt Kastner (project_room), Prague, Czechia
photography by Jan Kolský
– photo report on OFLUXO
– photo report on TiredMass
– photo report on saliva.live
– photo report on ArtMirror
– photo report on Artalk
Shine as a trap. Sparkle as a tactic. Markéta Slaná’s exhibition project Congratulations, You Have Just Lost! in the projekt_room at hunt kastner presents a series of objects that analyse contemporary subjectivity, digital identity and spectacle through the optics of shine. The exhibition explores how visual attractiveness becomes a tool of manipulation in an age where attention is a valued commodity. Here, shine does not only function as a visual phenomenon, but as a medium of illusion. What appears to be a win may be an ingeniously constructed defeat. Under the so-called “politics of shine”, shine becomes an instrument of visibility and discipline: what is shiny is seen; what is seen is even more often displayed thanks to algorithms. This aesthetic strategy is directly related to the discourse of online performativity. Digital platforms – especially social media – reward specific forms of self-presentation, often supported by various filters and effects (“digital shine”). The subject thus becomes a player in a system where shine is not just an ornament but a symbol of success. We are therefore following the trajectory of the evolution of shine from its natural materials (water, pearl, silk) through industrialized forms (chrome, plastic, vinyl) to its digital equivalent, which loses its original value and becomes a sign of mass accessibility and a play on make-believe.
The central element of Markéta Slaná’s installation is a larger-than-life replica of the Pandora bracelet – an iconic object of personalised luxury that can be complemented with selected charms to express personal characteristics or milestones, be they memories, hobbies, relationships or aspirations. In the artist’s interpretation, however, this object changes: the eight charms bear the letters M, A, N, I, P, U, L, A, T, E (or perhaps A, L, U, M, I, N, A, T, E ?). In this conception, the bracelet becomes a monument to control and unfulfilled desire – close to its distant relative: the electronic surveillance bracelet (prison monitoring bracelet). The built-in temperature sensor in one of the pendants, which collects data that is not readable in any way and it is not even clear for what purpose it will be used, further accentuates the tension between the impersonal logic of technology and human resources. This creates a vicious circle in which the subject watches oneself or is watched through aesthetic choices and affective expressions. Its chrome sheen becomes the message itself – a visual trap that leads to homogenization instead of individuation. Attention, emotion, and memory become raw materials in a system of invisible markets that determine what is worthy of preserving and sharing.
In a similar context, two other parts of the installation come to the forefront. The first of these – scratch-off lottery tickets on the walls – thematise the illusion of choice and algorithmic deception. Each lottery ticket promises a prize, a glamorized life, but is also governed by chance and illegible rules as the expectation of winning is ironically subverted during the scratching process. The second part is a make-up palette whose colors replicate the quadrants of a political compass. Here, pigment is transformed into a medium through which the subject can “apply” a particular political identity according to an arbitrary tutorial. In this sense, the palette functions as a materialization of the concept of the “girlstack” introduced by Alex Quicho to describe the layered, cultural and technological construction of the “girl” as a medium of desire, exchange value and instrument of power. The girl here is not real, but functions as an operational interface for the digital economy of attention – as a “desiring machine” and “living currency” that aestheticizes and thus neutralizes its own gesture. The palette thus not only ironizes the possibility of political choice, but also translates it into the form of a consumption decision. After all, gloss – in the form of decorative lip cosmetics or highlighter – often symbolises the first entry into adulthood and the arena of performativity, where to be “seen” is to be “taken into account”. A black and white photo of makeup products printed on a building brick ironically refers to similar. In her practice, Slaná thus visually switches between the world of hyper-feminine aesthetics and engineering coldness, between naive cuteness and dystopian design, while her pieces first seduce and only later reveal their logic.
But this is nothing new – this mode has its antecedents in 20th century cultural representations, as the case of Doris in Irmgard Keun’s novel The Artificial Silk Girl (1932) shows. Doris flees economic insecurity to Berlin to become “ein Glanz”, a shine. Her desire to “become a shine” involves both economic liberation and social recognition. Glamour, here embodied by the shimmer of silk, is not just a luxury – it is a condition of existence. In doing so, Keun reveals that the shine of glamour is not just about the aesthetic transformation of the body, but an institutional strategy of visibility. Glamour “subjectivizes” – it produces the subject through the desire to be seen, wanted, recognized. At the same time, it offers a false redemption: in the end, Doris fails, her “artificial silk” revealing the limits of emancipation in a system that never belonged to her.
The exhibition Congratulations, You Have Just Lost! updates this idea in the digital era, translating theoretical concepts into tangible objects that are activated during performance – shiny, attractive, yet functionally unsettling, in which it shows aesthetic appeal as a mask for structural manipulation. The prize that the viewer receives is merely a simulacrum – a shiny fragment of a system whose logic cannot be easily revealed because it is located directly in the way we look, feel and choose.
Markéta Slaná (*1997) is a graduate of the studio Fine Art IV (currently under the direction of Jiří Thýn and Václav Kopecký, formerly under the direction of Aleksandra Vajd and Martins Kohout) at the Academy of Arts, Architecture, and Design (UMPRUM) in Prague. Slaná is a multidisciplinary artist whose work deals with the tension between the digital environment and lived social experience, primarily through installation and performance. Her work often alludes to absurdity and post-irony, reflecting the tension between a hyper-connected yet disconnected world. Her work has been presented in exhibitions at the Museumsquartier in Vienna, the National Gallery Prague, Fotograf and Garage galleries in Prague, TIC Gallery in Brno, FAVU Gallery, Villa Tugendhat (Brno House of Arts), the Zlín Youth Salon, and the PAF Gallery in Olomouc. Recently, she participated in artist residency programs at the Delfina Foundation in London, the Rupert Residency in Vilnius, and the Brno House of Arts.