Kurátorská prehliadka výstavy Vážne hry

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

In the era of drone warfare and remotely controlled weapon 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 that of a game. The screen framing the target and the screen framing the game are increasingly one and the same.

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

Serious Games is not an exhibition about war in an illustrative sense. It is an exhibition about the image as a space where the boundary between play and conflict is produced as a condition of how we perceive and understand the world. In both cases, painting functions as an interface, just like the screens through which soldiers monitor drone footage.