GAVU Presents The Cake is a Lie at Veletržní 63, Prague

The social contract around success has always operated through a certain kind of faith. That if you do the work, maintain the image, meet the expectations, the reward will come eventually, inevitably, as a matter of logic.

The promise of success does not disappear - it recedes. It holds its position on the horizon, organizing effort and shaping the self, regardless of whether arrival was ever part of the arrangement

But faith in a system is not the same as the system delivering, and somewhere in the distance between the promise and the outcome, a great deal of labor quietly accumulates.

Curatorial Text:

The exhibition The Cake is a Lie presents the work of six Czech and Slovak artists:

Anna-Marie Berdychová, Valentýna Janů, Tereza Kalousová, Bety Krňanská, Markéta Slaná and Nik Timková.

They emerge from an environment that speaks the language of growth, flexibility, and individual responsibility.

The promise of mobility and personal success has become a horizon that quietly organizes expectations and everyday decisions, as a promise of reward that will arrive if we persevere.

The curatorial selection by Lamija Čehajić and Jirka Skála brings together two generations of artists whose work touches on the tension between aspiration and its social limits. It navigates the pressure to respond and adapt and the need to shape a coherent, recognizable identity capable of existing in public space.

To what extent are these expectations formed by social conditions—by gender self-definition or by belonging to a particular class? The exhibited works share an interest in small rituals of self-discipline, consumption, and the aesthetics of everyday life in which this tension is repeatedly performed.

Anna-Marie Berdychová creates photographic images rich in symbolic coding and instinctive storytelling through both digital and physical manipulation. The works are completed with DIY authorial framing that partially covers the images, fixes them in place, and introduces a particular tension.

Valentýna Janů works with the indexical qualities of textile materials—their ability to carry traces of touch, pressure, and time—and with the technique of artistic printing on fabric.

The resulting works are stretched into a circular format that defines an intimate and safely enclosed space.

Tereza Kalousová refers to global visual and corporate imagination that shapes ideas of both success and failure.

The exhibited wooden spheres bear engraved letters which, in certain sequences, can reveal the meaning of our efforts—or just as easily leave it in an unstable state.

Bety Krňanská appropriates textile structures by engraving and symbolically inscribing them into components of automobile bodywork.

Engine hoods and doors damaged in accidents thus carry ornamental interventions that transform what would otherwise be a smooth surface loaded with status.

Markéta Slaná develops the motif of repetition and discipline through an authorial object enclosed in the endless loop of a ballet barre, where movement turns into rhythm without resolution, only with return.

The monumental installation by Nik Timková turns attention to the never-ending maintenance of the household, especially textile work balancing between small repairs of clothing, leisure time, and occasional community gatherings.

The promise of future self-realization remains in circulation like an image that continually recedes. The illusion does not cling to the need itself but to the idea of its ultimate fulfillment.

Movement returns to further adjustments—to the continuous calibration of both the image and the self. Within this ongoing process subtle shifts appear—small changes in tempo or perspective that do not break the loop but allow it to be inhabited with greater ease.

The horizon does not disappear. It remains a distant point of orientation, one we relate to with the awareness of its contingency and malleability. From this awareness emerges space for deviations and for working with the rules that shape us.

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