Jakub Choma

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'.

Jakub Choma (*1995, Košice, Slovakia) graduated in 2023 from the painting studio of Jiří Černický and Michal Novotný at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague. Already during his studies, he was awarded the Jindřich Chalupecký Award for 2020 – the most prestigious Czech competition for artists under 35 years of age. Merging diverse media such as painting, assemblage, sculpture, sound and video, he creates complex installations that address our bodily existence within digital infrastructure. Choma exhibits prolifically both at home and abroad. He is represented by the Polansky Gallery, which hosted his solo shows Life for Dummies (2017) and Stepping on a Lego (2018). Choma’s other solo projects include Childishly Fresh Eyes (2022) at Zaazrak Dornych in Brno, Distant Hum (2021) in Prague's NoD space, Living The Gimmick in VUNU Gallery Košice (2018), Resilience in Vilnius’ Editorial (2019) and most recently Metallic Aftertaste (2023), presented by Polansky here on Vienna Contemporary. His work has been exhibited in many group shows from Brussels to New York, State of High Perfor- mance at Basis in Frankfurt, Vienna, Budapest, Wales, Riga, Máscaras (Masks) at Galeria Municipal do Porto, and Stockholm. Choma’s pieces were featured in a number of off-site shows and are often present on online curatorial art plaforms such as Ofluxo, for which he created online projects Wounds Heal Faster in a Metallic Mouth (2020) and Beta Ground (Delirium Obstacle) (2019). Despite his young age, Choma has already twice participated in Liste Art Fair Basel, both alone (2021) and in collaboration with Pakui Hardware (2019). In the summer of 2022, he completed a residency in New York with Residency Unlimited. He lives and works in Prague.