LUFT Festival Presents Unconscious Paradises at Gallery GAFU, Ostrava

Paradise tends to be positioned as a place: somewhere ahead, somewhere earned. Unconscious Paradises, part of the 6th edition of the LUFT audiovisual festival, treats it differently, as something already present but partially inaccessible, an inner register that cannot be approached directly. That distinction shifts the whole premise.

What curators Jakub Černý, Dominika Goralska, and Barbora Mikudová have assembled isn't a show about peace. It's a show about the difficulty of knowing what you want, and whether the act of wanting changes what it is.

Paradise, when located inside the self, becomes a question about the self. Whether that question can be answered is precisely what this exhibition leaves open.

GAFU occupies a modern gallery volume in Ostrava. Polished concrete floors, structural columns, clerestory light cutting across white walls. The space is spare without being cold, and the exhibition uses its architecture deliberately.

An aluminum structural frame, the kind ordinarily specified for window curtain walls, stands freestanding in the middle of the room. A large-format painting hangs suspended within it. The CE certification markings are still printed along the profile edge, which seems right: paradise, here, is always installed inside some other structure.

Sabina Knetlová's grey cement sculptures anchor the room. Two figures share a single body, distinct but conjoined, seated, attentive, hands raised with eyes set into the palms where fingers would be. They face outward without urgency. Smaller single-headed forms occupy plain wooden plinths alongside shallow troughs of raw earth and soil. The material logic is quiet and cumulative: there's something between the archaic and the freshly made in these works, as if they belong to a time that hasn't arrived yet.

The amber wall piece by Limi.noko carries its own internal weather. A shaped panel of deep rust-colored resin, textured like coral seen from above, holds white cast forms at its lower edge, bone-adjacent shapes and what appear to be kanji-like characters pressed into the surface. The resin absorbs and deflects light depending on where you stand. The work seems less like a depiction than a preserved condition: something that was already there, extracted and made legible.

Paula Malinowska's painting reaches. A large hand extends across a blue-to-pink gradient sky toward reflective spheres containing forest interiors and fragmented faces; bare winter trees stand in the background, a fish arcing below the waterline. The surrealism doesn't read as decorative, it feels like the logic of an almost-remembered dream, where proximity substitutes for causality and the image holds just long enough to seem real before it slides.

Stach Szumski places a small skeletal figure on a mound of earth in the middle of the floor. Upright, spindly, made of what appears to be cast material resembling bone or salt, it stands without apparent destination.

Beside it, a freestanding board leans against the wall with a handwritten Czech text that reads: Současné umění milujeme tě, ale je čas jít dál... Floresance začala!!!, "Contemporary art, we love you, but it's time to move on... The Floressance has started." The tone is deadpan and slightly absurd, which makes it sit more comfortably in the room than a serious institutional statement would.

At a moment when image-production is essentially continuous and the inner life is perpetually asked to represent itself outward, the question of what cannot be extracted, what remains genuinely unconscious, becomes harder to answer and more pressing.

The artists here don't offer resolution. The rabbit hole, as the curators note in their framing, is part of the structure. What it opens onto is still being found.

Artists to Follow:

Instagram Jakub Černý
Instagram Dominika Goralska
Instagram Barbora Mikudová
Instagram Jiří Baštýř
Instagram Botond Keresztesi
Instagram Sabina Knetlová
Instagram Paula Malinowska
Instagram Limi.noko
Instagram Stach Szumski
Instagram Kateřina Šantrochová