Game Palace of the Hell Master
The pop-up exhibition “Game Palace of the Hell Master” combines—like the Bermuda Triangle—three imaginary islands of literary inspiration: the tragic dimension of old Slovak ballads (for example “The Yellow Lily” by Ján Botto), the supernatural afterlife atmosphere of the classic Gothic novel, and the sexual futility expressed in the symbolist-decadent poetry collection Sexus necans by Jiří Karásek ze Lvovic.
The paintings refer to the bestiality and dysphoria of erotic desire, as expressed in the Latin aphorism “Post coitum omne animal triste”—“After sexual intercourse, every creature is sad.” In her works, Fajčíková presents tragedies of the futility of the sexual drive and a panopticon of the Schopenhauerian will to life, which is the source of all human suffering.
This irrational blind will, which can never be satisfied and inevitably leads to suffering, is the hidden “Hell Master” whose sadistic game we are forced to play without ever knowing its rules in advance. The only thing we know about this game is that it is subversive and chaotic. Within the game, the power relation between subject and object is overturned: the game develops its own dynamics, and the player loses a part of their individuality. Hans-Georg Gadamer observed that a game “moves” the player. Similarly, Georges Bataille associated the act of play with the transgression of social norms and understood it as an ecstatic ritual in which the loss of the self becomes inevitable.
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2026/02/11 -
Trat42, Praha
