A guided tour of Plato's Third Eye exhibition with the curator Karina Pfeiffer Kottová

Exhibiting artists: Matyáš Chochola (CZ), Alexandr Puškin (CZ), Annika Rixen (DE), Kirstine Roepstorff (DK), Pavel Sterec (CZ), Roman Štětina (CZ), Iris Touliatou (GR), Jaro Varga (SK), Sinta Werner (DE)

Curator: Karina Pfeiffer Kottová

This group show presenting works by nine international contemporary artists currently based in Prague and Berlin is built around the topic of light and shadow seen an allegory of the notion of reality and vision. Within the framework of Plato's notorious cave, everything we perceive in our daily lives can be seen as mere shadows, while the true "reality" only reveals itself to those capable of thinking beyond tangible objects and measurable phenomena. The interpretation that serves as a possible key to the present exhibition comes from Harvard specialists in cognitive and neurological systems on one hand, and the author of an esoteric bestseller on the other: the cave can be the human skull, within which the construction of the surrounding world is taking place. While a scientist quite naturally maintains that we cannot escape from this cave and that the real world around us can be apprehended only through the shadows in our head, the esoteric mind sees the way out of this cave in the so called “third eye”, which is considered, mainly by the Eastern tradition, to be the mystical gate to extra-sensual perception. The recipes of how to open the third eye have lately flooded popular websites of global reach, offering a medley of instant spirituality, online tarot, mind reading, and the like. 

The exhibition at MeetFactory is a constellation of works by artists who freely and yet consistently reinterpret both the existent reality around them and their personal and collective past and phenomena that, in relation to the above, may seem quite supernatural or at least hard to explain. It deals light and shadow as metaphors of the tension between the material and the immaterial, perceiving it from both adoring and critical or ironic perspectives. The exhibition draws on a project called Metaphysics of Discipline, which was presented in the Czech Center in Berlin in summer 2013.

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