Vienna Contemporary: Jakub Choma
September 12, 2023 — September 15, 2023
Polansky Gallery – Vienna Contemporary, Kursalon Vienna
On the occasion of Jakub Choma and Polansky Gallery's solo presentation at Vienna Contemporary, a brochure with a text revealing the individual layers of the Metallic Aftertaste project was published.
Metallic Aftertaste
Polansky Gallery presents for Vienna Contemporary 2023 a solo booth featuring multimedia installation Metallic Aftertaste by Jakub Choma. The project draws inspiration from the immaterial domain of digital world-building (precisely WoW), and through the resemblance of an urban construction site delves deeper into its analogy with the human body and contemporary social systems. The absence of tangible substance in the digital realm is replaced in the physical world by the artist's compulsive search for it – in Choma's words, we can speak of a new sensibility in relation to materiality after the digital experience. This is expressed alongside the seamless integration of elements such as video and sound, by images that spill over into objects and assemblages that combine different material, technical, and semantic starting points and ways of working. There one finds a jute bag, excavations, dirt, plexiglas, plastic and metal sheets, scrap, rubble, pigments, springs modified by laser engravers, CNC milling machines, and UV printers. However, the use of cork is particularly striking, functioning as a basic artistic unit. In its structure, cork reminds us of the pores of human skin, but also of the digital pixel; it reminds us of its fragility, but at the same time it can be perceived, and perhaps even more significantly, as a potentiality for adaptability and resilience. At its core, such a seemingly trashy aesthetic reveals a carefully structured system characterized by methodical procedures and the inventive manipulation of materials from various sources- whether autobiographical, fictional, private, or shared. In this way Choma is building to an inevitable collision – a metallic aftertaste, indicating health issues, symbolizing dysfunctional internal systems masked by their outward functionality, with a 'temporary state of bliss'.
