ZBYNĚK BALADRÁN

CARTOGRAPHY OF THE INVISIBLE (NECROLOGY #2)

The complex circuits through which capital moves are abstracted, the elusive power remains unseen and misunderstood. Zbynek Baladrán's exhibition seeks to make some of these movements more visible. He examines the power practices of global capitalism, finds parallels between speculation as a mode of production of capitalist societies and the critical discourse of contemporary art. It shows that the institutional necros of art is only one of the extremities of the decaying corpse of capitalism. Necrology can be described as an author's para-science, which deals with the processes of decay associated with power practices, with perverse working conditions, or with adoration of militarization and killing in the middle of a world seen in  black-and-white terms. At the same time, Necrology is fundamentally linked to critical revision of the apparatuses that established the institutional practice of the art museum — with its practices, dispositions, narratives and marketing strategies. Tools of cognition inspired by anthropology and archaeology do not turn to the distant past, but rather in form of atlases, maps, and diagrams become dispositives for new arrangements and visualizations of digital data. Zbyněk Baladrán's cartographies draw our attention to the extension and generalization of abstract financial chains to all branches of the global political scene (financial markets, arms races, investment, labor), social imagination and art. It is the visual presentation of invisible relationships and their rearrangement under the dictation of a different operating system that produces strange taxonomies, which is in fact the main focus of most of the exhibited works by Zbyněk Baladrán. What do these cryptic compositions of fragments actually say? Do they constitute a self-referential circle of analogies between the fragments and the index, such as could repeat without beginning and end the vacuity of our epoch? A unifying architecture is provided to the digital graphics by an installation made from recycled furniture boards. The way of linking furniture with maps is not only idiosyncratically marked by a certain poverty, but also functional, much like museum furniture. On the one hand, we look at the exhibited objects as things in a museum, but on the other hand, Baladrán's simulations strongly shake the sense of certainty: these installations are something other than what they seem to be. Thus, they create a contradiction between a convincing "framing", which is supposed to confirm the status of the exhibited objects, and "deviating from this type of conventions". The project is a continuation of the exhibition organized by the artist in cooperation with the curator Marika Kupková in the Brno Tic gallery. 

Zbyněk Baladrán: Cartography of the Invisible (Necrology #2)
The exhibition is open from 3 March to 7 May 2023
Curated by Daniel Grúň
The Július Koller Society, Bratislava, Slovakia
www.juliuskollersociety.org
Photo documentation by Ján Kekeli
Supported from public funding by the Slovak Arts Council.

Cartography of the Invisible (a text by Daniel Grúň)

Omnipresent Effects

Why are the bodies of the living dead so omnipresent and so attractive? Few realize these days that the horror staple of Hollywood zombies are adapted from the experience of enslaved Africans and their descendants in the former colony of Haiti. The earliest known mentions of the origins of zombies can be traced to Western Africa, specifically the area of lower Kongo where nzambi can be found as the religious idiom for a god or a spirit. Nzambi was part of the belief that the dead could return, visit their families, and bring them either help or destruction. But in Haiti, where by 1789 half a million slaves lived and worked on French plantations, the idea that the dead walked among the living turned into the idea of the living dead — people without all aspects of human personality and dignity, except for their physical capacity for thoughtless work. In the Haitian context, the zombie has become a figure of extreme perpetuation — a living worker capable of hard work in the name of others, but completely devoid of memory and self-awareness. The extent to which Hollywood horror transmits images of zombies into popular culture is not without relations to the world mortified by global capitalism.[1] Although the effects of capitalism are much like zombies omnipresent, they can be seen and measured, capitalism‘s basic features are not immediately evident. The complex circuits through which capital moves are abstracted, the elusive power remains unseen and misunderstood. Zbynek Baladrán‘s exhibition seeks to make some of these movements more visible. He examines the power practices of global capitalism, finds parallels between speculation as a mode of production of capitalist societies and the critical discourse of contemporary art. It shows that the institutional necros of art is only one of the extremities of the decaying corpse of capitalism.

Necrology in Motion

Necrology can be described as an author‘s para-science, which deals with the processes of decay associated with power practices, with perverse working conditions, or with adoration of arms races and killing in the middle of a world seen in black-and-white terms. „All this is around us, within reach, accessible and so frequented that I do not know, how else to emphasize that it should not be like this… The Metaphor describes the decay that we feel around us. And, perhaps, this is merely the next stage of progress.”[2] At the same time, Necrology is fundamentally linked to critical revision of the apparatuses that established the institutional practice of the art museum — with its practices, dispositions, narratives and marketing strategies. „If Necrology served as a metaphor for the art world, it would probably refer to value-seeking elites in a decaying world. Something like a search for diamonds in a cemetery. Necrology can be be useful in interpreting the world in which we live…”[3] Zbyněk Baladrán describes necrology in three ways: as a doctrine of decomposition processes and thus as a certain type of reasoning, as a tool or a working method, and finally as an analogy for artistic practice in neo-liberalism. If the market, with its exchange value, is the only evaluation system that still gives contemporary art some seriousness today, the contribution of art to social change and its potential for participation in it is minimal. This skeptical assumption is the basis of self-reflection situated in the information flow of data, the continuous stream of which is sometimes captured in the islands of literary references. Tools of cognition inspired by anthropology and archaeology do not turn to the distant past, but rather in form of atlases, maps, and diagrams become dispositives for new arrangements and visualizations of digital data. Zbyněk Baladrán‘s cartographies draw our attention to the extension and generalization of abstract financial chains to all branches of the global political scene (financial markets, arms races, investment, labor), social imagination and art. The necrology method consists in „primitive accumulation“ of samples of global capital: the isolation of selected data banks and their transformation into dissected anthropological objects. This test-run dissection in fragmented territories and conceptual fields brings these objects and processes under a specific value form, examines them as a desiccated artistic capital.

Invisible Relationships

It is the visual presentation of invisible relationships and their rearrangement under the dictation of a different operating system that produces strange taxonomies, which is in fact the main focus of most of the exhibited works by Zbyněk Baladrán. The mind map Evidence of Neuroplasticity at first glance depicts something like a cross section of the muscular apparatus of the eye found in the anatomical atlas of the human body. The diverging lines of muscle fibers on all sides segue into text lines. The lines of different lengths spread into space form a hint of an eyeball. The reader of the lines gradually discovers an ever-expanding dictionary of militaristic concepts, wherein the world is translated and embodied in military terms, abbreviations, and neologisms. Bone Taxonomy presents analogies of weapon system classification based on an illustrative bone diagram. Baladrán uses them to point out that digital technologies and their expansion are based on development of weapon systems and the entanglement with the military-industrial complex as a modern paradigm of protection under which we are voluntarily forced to live. Logo of one of the world‘s largest credit rating agencies S&P Global (Stratigraphy Ratings) is presented in analogy with the cross section of a cave where the Paleolithic man resided. The database used comes from the financial business. The rating agency acts as a guarantor of the systematic assessment of the state, quality, and chance of further development of financial products. Stratification paraphrases the fundamental principle of free markets and capitalism, namely trust, as well as the tools to build and control it. Investments linked to financial speculation are the fuel of capital for future-oriented growth. Thus, necrology which examines invisible relationships is also a certain form of „speculation as a method of production.” It refers to the by now already confirmed compatibility of logics between appreciation of art and financial capital.[4] Since the artist, much like a financial instrument, can collect various types of data and reproduce them as art, they capture in the present moment a value that has not yet been created.

The State of the World (and Man) after the Cataclysm

Image Index is a series of relief panels, which wittily complements the exhibition by adding the reconstruction of the world after a cataclysm. The series has no referent, its content is broken into barely legible fragments, the associative arrangement of which is captured by a numbered diagram. The post-humanist ambiance of this work is also achieved by the fact that the fragments resemble shards from containers as if they came from an excavation site… The difference however lies in that these shards are not shards, but torn shreds that carry on their surfaces fragmentary reproductions from textbooks — it is impossible to piece them back together and it is impossible to attribute a clearly articulated meaning to them. What do these cryptic compositions of fragments actually say? Do they constitute a self-referential circle of analogies between the fragments and the index, such as could repeat without beginning and end the vacuity of our epoch? The encrypted index actually performs the absurdity of knowledge with which it captures the position of things in the field of vision and rules over them. The six-minute video Praise of Dialectics provides an update to a selection of several short prose works by Bertolt Brecht from the book Mr. Keuner‘s Stories.[5] What they have in common with his plays is the use of dialectics in the form of short dialogues. The video places the dialogues in a kind of infinite outer space. The flight of the camera in the empty space between the digitized artifacts bears a remotely resemblance to a spaceship and funny remarks of its captain. Zbyněk Baladrán emphasizes the topicality of Marxist thought also in his work The Rule of Money in Civil Society. His partners in dialog there are further classics of world theater, Johann Wolfgang Goethe and William Shakespeare. An extensive 1 : 1 scale archaeological map records the discourse on the power of money in the form of cartographic notation, drawings of human remains juxtaposed with excavated coins. The map is again ruled by the index, which also determines the placement and reading of signs that instead explanations feature excerpts from classic works of theater and Marx‘s economical and philosophical manuscripts.

A unifying architecture is provided to the digital graphics by an installation made from recycled furniture boards. The way of linking furniture with maps is not only idiosyncratically marked by a certain poverty, but also functional, much like museum furniture. „In the museum, the visitor sees presentation of a specific research, and the knowledge is shown in a matter-of-fact form. Most people do not realize that they are looking at a mixture of consensual ideological ideas forming the beliefs of class-based or ethnic groups for whom the exposition is intended.”[6] While in a museum, sharing the conventions between the creators of museum exhibitions and their viewers is the norm, in an exhibition in a gallery of contemporary art, these conventions are questioned. On the one hand, we look at the exhibited objects as things in a museum, but on the other hand, Baladrán‘s simulations strongly shake the sense of certainty: these installations are something other than what they seem to be. Thus, they create a contradiction between a convincing „framing“, which is supposed to confirm the status of the exhibited objects, and „deviating from this type of conventions“ (Z.B.). And it is this deviation that helps to avoid the trap of seemingly convincing certainties, but also to seize this trap from the „invisible hand of the market“ and charge it with a proper dose of (not only black) humor.

1. David McNally: Monsters of the market: Zombies, vampires and global capitalism. Leiden / Boston: Brill, 2011, 210-211.
2. Zbyněk Baladrán, Necrology. Curated by Marika Kupková. TIC Gallery, Brno. Interview with the artist. https://galerie-tic. cz/files/2022/12/tic_nekrologie_a4_cz_pages.pdf
3. Ibid.
4. Marina Vishmidt, Speculation as a mode of production: forms of value subjectivity in art and capital. Leiden / Boston: Brill, 2018, 10-11.
5. https://monoskop.org/images/6/69/Brecht_Bertolt_Stories_of_Mr_Keuner.pdf
6. Zbyněk Baladrán, Necrology. Curated by Marika Kupková. TIC Gallery, Brno. Interview with the artist. https://galerie-tic. cz/files/2022/12/tic_nekrologie_a4_cz_pages.pdf