You May Say I’m a Dreamer but I’m
The unusual art project of Ezra Šimek will be presented at the opening on November 21 at VUNU Gallery in the Kunsthalle.
The exhibited work You May Say I’m a Dreamer but I’m Actually Dissociating can be viewed as part of the Art & Tech Days festival from November 22 to 27.
An irregular, bit eccentric, slightly disorienting, weird, one might even say: queer journey takes place in between these three pillars. A journey from an old abandoned mining town of the olden days, the rough days, of the now so romanticised Wild West, leading to a rave club, or was it the other way around? The lighting is the sunset on testosterone. The setting is uncertainly bizarre – be it a lab or a barn. A story of various characters meeting in one body. Your daily news anchor. Your gender inclusion and sex education teacher. Your gentle genderless traveller. Your old time miner. Your cowboi. And somewhere in the distance, your witch. All yours, yet none in reach, and even if so, you don’t have any right to them. You can only listen. Learn, Unlearn. Dismiss. Critique. Leave be. Sing along. Join the fight.
The show “You May Say I’m a Dreamer but I’m Actually Dissociating” brings together a newly formed narrative line through the work of Ezra Šimek. The educational character of their older works focusing on trans* knowledge 101 meets poetic abstraction and research into marginalized communities in the latest film trilogy exploring and appropriating archetypes from popular culture, namely figures of the Cowboy and the Witch. The soft tissue binding the works slides over various societal, learned, and encoded norms around the gender binary and internalized trans* hate and violence, not even mentioning the homophobia so ingrained in local culture and politics.
Ezra Šimek (*1997) graduated in Photography (Studio of New Aesthetic) from Prague’s Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague and now continues with their MA in TransArts at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, diploma studies at the Digital Media and Moving Image Studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna as well as an MA in contemporary art theory at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava, Slovakia. In their work, Ezra primarily deals with queer identity politics and sensitivity around language, presented through various time-based media (film, performative lecture, computer game) or site-responsive installations, sound works and writing. They explore gender as a societal construct comparable to mythology that attempts to create more fictional narratives and to boost synergy between different shattered realities of our times and fantasy and thus create a new inclusive and speculative reality.
Their work has been presented within the Czech art scene at the National Gallery in Prague (2022), Prague City Gallery (2022), or Svetova 1 (2022) and abroad, for example at the Museum for Contemporary Art Zagreb (2022), Kunsthalle Wien (2022) and Haus Wien, Vienna (2021). They are the holder of the Jindřich Chalupecký Art Award 2022.
See the festival webpage Art & Tech Days for more information.
Tickets for another events of Art & Tech Days 2022 on sale:
Opening Act: bit.ly/opening_act
Conference: bit.ly/atdays_conference
The event is held in collaboration with the Košice 2.0 project, which is co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund through the Urban Innovative Actions Initiative.