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A visual representation of the exhibition’s title can be seen in several drawings by Jirka Skála – a five-pointed star bordered with lace, a commodity evoking luxury and the privileged classes. Thanks to the Industrial Revolution, this valuable commodity for the aristocracy became a more accessible decoration for bourgeois clothing and interiors, and ultimately a cheap, mass-produced product. Several lace stars, referencing social change, conclude Skála’s entire series, which he has been working on gradually over the last three years. The key to deciphering these tangles is Karl Marx’s Capital.

The series of fifteen drawings, Reproduction: Instrument of Discovery, is a precisely executed record of a social system. It represents an attempt to translate the economic abstraction of the second volume of Capital into a visual form. This DNA-like structure materializes Marx’s socio-economic theory of how a capitalist economy continuously renews and expands its production processes, wealth distribution, and class structure. Step by step, we can identify individual passages showing how capital circulates, how it accumulates, and how means of production and the manufacturing of consumer goods are added. The series then culminates in a triptych featuring the aforementioned five-pointed stars bordered with lace (an exclusive product) and smileys (a mass product). Skála captures capital as a flow, an infrastructure reminiscent of the superorganism from the popular series Stranger Things, where every part is linked to the next and subordinated to a higher consciousness. By translating Marx’s schematic analysis into an organic, dynamic structure, he reveals the true, aggressive nature of capital.

The stars from the final triptych leap over onto the drawing Dust-choked Orchestra by the artistic duo Jakub Hájek & František Hanousek. Skála has worked with the duo several times. This time, although they do not create joint works, they are united not only by the medium of drawing (after all, wire objects are also drawings in space) but also by an interest in the legacy of Marxist theories. In Hájek & Hanousek’s large-format drawing, the tentacles of capital form into specific layers: figure – landscape – machine. The gears of industry intertwine the foreground with the bourgeoisie in nature, and the working class and industrialized landscape in the background. On decorative plinths reminiscent of 19th-century salon exhibitions, bizarre objects stand instead of polished statuettes or vases. Hand-wiring and a raw aesthetic decisively reject bourgeois taste as well as the principles of machine-producing cheap bourgeois decorations – the emblematic product of the Industrial Revolution. The authors work four-handedly. Co-creating as a pair is another facet of their work with the sentiment associated with a return to pre-industrial times and the thwarted ideals of the 20th century.

The proletarian revolution, the most hopeful ideal of the 20th century, foundered, and we must cope again and again with unjust capitalism, currently in its digital mutation. Marx will haunt us as long as capitalism exists. Reading Marx does not mean blindly adopting his theories. However, it can offer us a critical perspective that might help stop the destructive power of the current economic and social arrangement.

Anežka Chalupová, Vít Novák