Kurátorská prehliadka výstavy Vážne hry

The title of the exhibition refers to Harun Farocki's film cycle, in which he explored the use of game simulations in the training of American soldiers. Farocki showed that simulation does not function as an escape from reality, but as a form of it — a place where patterns of behavior and decision-making are formed before the body finds itself in actual conflict.

In the era of drone conflicts and remotely controlled weapons systems, the battlefield has been transformed into an operational field of images. Violence is mediated by interfaces that transform it into sequences of decisions — a logic formally indistinguishable from play. The screen framing the goal and the screen framing the game are increasingly the same screen.

The exhibition brings two painters into dialogue. Jakub Strýček draws on the aesthetics of video games: his canvases evoke simulation environments and fragmented perspectives in which the subject is divided into navigable positions. Denis Braun works with the iconography of war, with weapons, landscape and the body absorbed into surveillance and intervention systems. His paintings transcend individual canvases: figurative motifs, abstract surfaces and hints of violence coexist in a state of permanent contamination.

Serious Games is not an exhibition about war in the illustrative sense. It is an exhibition about the image as a place where the boundary between play and conflict is produced as a condition of how we perceive and understand the world. In both cases, the painting acts as an interface, as do the screens through which the soldiers watch the drones' views.