Jáchym Řičánek↓

About the work

Cyberland

Jáchym Řičánek usually explores personal themes, which he processes through performance and text with an emphasis on internal impulses, compulsive thoughts, and psychological pressures as the main motivational forces behind his creative activities.

Cyberland focuses on a specific village in southern Bohemia. Řičánek makes use of the visual language of world-renowned animated series, comic books, and computer and board games popular with preschool children in order to interpret the village’s oral history. It was inspired by his artistic collaboration with the preschool in Hosín that he himself visited as a child. With this work, he returns to painting, a medium that he was engaged in before his time at AVU.

By incarnating cyberheroes into everyday objects, Řičánek can meet these beings outside of the virtual world. In this way, he explores the intersection between the „analogue childhood“ often associated with growing up in the countryside and the digital worlds associated with new technologies and the internet. The result is a space that blurs the line separating these two areas.