The exhibition at the Black Cube, GMU’s exhibition space for works from the gallery’s Moving Image Collection, presents Erik Sikora’s new video Narwhal Navigation (2026), which loosely follows on from his older works The Endless Exhibition and The Invention of Navigation (2007).
The videos are a part of Sikora’s long-term exploration of the relationship between the body, the landscape, technology and language. His starting points are movement through the landscape and verbal dialogue. His works also explore our changing conditions for perceiving and interpreting the world. The relationship between the body, the landscape, audiovisual record and language is altered by the advent of new technologies whose present form was scarcely imaginable when he was making his older videos. Sikora is interested primarily in these new technologies’ rhetorical efficiency and their ability to generate answers fluidly, to hide uncertainty behind self-assured language and to project confidence even when meaning becomes nonsensical. The new video expands on his performative movement through and commentary on the landscape through the use of a fictional bodily extension inspired by the horn – or rather, tooth – of the narwhal.
Erik Sikora uses humour to explore serious issues such as changes in humankind’s yearning for knowledge, which is currently reflected in our daily use of internet browsers, the functioning of the art industry and the environmental crisis. His art takes an absurd yet simultaneously critical view of contemporary society in general and art in particular.
A central characteristic of the art of ERIK SIKORA (b. 1986), who also appears under the pseudonym Džumelec, is a Neo-Dada approach that frees viewers from ingrained ways of viewing art while guiding them towards an authentic experience through play. He makes use of DIY methods, records live actions and asks various banal questions for which he tries to find his own answers.
The exhibition was supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic and the Statutory City of Hradec Králové.
