Out of the Sugar Factory - Etcetera Art by Dominik Adamec 20.3.2024 - 12.4.2024Curator: Michal Jalůvka

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We would be hard pressed to find a similar thing that so accurately reflects - figuratively and literally - the complexity of human civilization. It exists in countless chemical forms and compounds, and is the basic building block and energy source of all organisms. Its extraction, production and trade has its own troubled history, linked to colonialism and slavery. It is also a symbol of consumerism, capitalism and the present-day division of the world. It is the sweet spot of coffee, a life-giving substance, a drug and a white poison. It is the carrier of collective memory, the fuel and the guide for all human activity.

Sugar is the main motif of the book Aus der Zuckerfabrik by Dorothee Elmiger, which is a major inspiration for Dominik Adamec's exhibition of the same name. The latter works with sugar (like the book) as a starting point through whose lens one can view and get to the bottom of various topics. The interconnection between the exhibition and its literary inspiration is profound indeed. In fact, they share a similar "method" or way of communicating, which is metonymically represented in the book by the German term Gestrupp (or thicket, bush, or impenetrable forest), a figurative expression for the complexity of facts, concepts, events, and the relationships between them. Just as Elmiger associatively intersperses diary entries and notes relating to both her personal life (including observations of how sugar affects her personally) and actual historical events, gradually piecing together the fragments of an opaque jumble of information into a comprehensible whole of meaning, Dominik Adamec creates situations and objects that, on closer inspection, lead us to encounter more and more details. These may return us to the original whole, but also refer us to another, related topic. Through the impenetrable thicket, from the concrete to the abstract and vice versa.

Through sugar and its fetishizing role in history, we can view not only the history of colonialism and the course of seemingly ever-accelerating progress, but also the essential role of this substance in the human body. Indeed, sugar is intimately intertwined with the functioning of our bodies. On the one hand, it is absolutely essential, but at the same time it can be destructive. It is easy to become addicted to it, and it fuels the unconscious and constant hunger that is so typical of humans.

– Michal Jalůvka