Jakub Roček: Syntopia Brno Center-South - exhibition at Gallery 45000L

Jakub Roček relates to digital technologies such as virtual reality or digital 3D space in his work. In his drawings, objects, and video essays, he opens various subtopics of this broad field – for example, the connection of machines and human entities into new functional wholes. An important aspect of his work is the renaming and redefining of categories such as body, society, architecture, responsibility, or climate. A substantial part of his work involves using multiple media, both in terms of multimedia installations and in the sense of the workflow itself, where the subject of interest flows from medium to medium, thereby leading to its transformation.


The starting point of the project became the architecture of an extensive brutalist project, from which only one commercial building, recently demolished, was realized. The digital reconstruction was preceded by archival and field research of period environments, from which the author drew textures and structures. The result is not only a digital utopia but a collage of materials, ideologies, dreams, gloss, and societal taboos. Short animations connect the destruction of a specific department store with the end of an entire era – thematizing the vacuum of "post-November" moods. There is a multiplying feeling of discontinuity here, which we as a society try to suppress, but in light of current global crises, we should begin to direct our attention. A game about time that is no longer there – the countdown has ended and nothing has happened.

Sound design: Ladislav Mirvald
Curatorial collaboration and production: 4AM collective (Šárka Svobodová and Eva Truncová)
Graphics: Pavel Holomek