http://www.futuraproject.cz/en/futura/event/302-david-helan-dualcore-professor

While Banksy’s Dismaland amusement park for adults has faded faster than any Olympic sports ground and urban explorers are taking over Michael Jackson's Neverland resembling 3D-rendered locations of adventure video games, David Helán is relentlessly building the detached stations of his Heland amusement park. Meanwhile, depressed millennials make fun of death and feed themselves with memes as poisonous as tide pods. David Helán and Vojtěch Skácel are just a little bit older but they make it clear: Death is OK, when a well-learned professor is able to overclock even the worn-out liver. There is not such a acid rain of words in the world that that could not be dried by a lightning merz-hair dryer. The general revival of Dadaist forms and practices is a reaction to the bleak reality of an absurd global state of affairs. Against what and how does today's dada revolt? Humans of late capitalism → post-human art of early modernism?

David Helán artistic approach follows the spirit of modernist tradition of making art about art, but not for art. He leads a hybrid cultural war in no man’s land placed between post-conceptual experiments and saboteur-like squatting in abandonded avant-garde forms. Helán follows the footsteps of his professor Milos Šejn on his way to the muddy delta of a cryptic performance art, where the body impedes itself, dresses itself in alien disguises and is artificially suspended and put back in motion all the way to the edge of a vicious tragicomedy, before it falls to fall into existential darkness, in an anxious effort to escape its everyday experience. Does the reference to art history make real art of one's work? Is it just a safe alibi? Or could we assume that the artist is innocent, just caught in the debt trap - the questionable connection between art and life, the avant-garde heritage that has been changed to a curse in the hands of creative directors and other corporate artsy heads? On the ruins of museum of poshy design affairs museum, in a cabinet of curiosities from Etsy, illegal rave parties are taking place today. The stage setup is designed by Dual core professor nad Maricius Pičus is about to play. Way to go! The poetic word-play of David Helán in something that successfully infects the Czech cultural environment. The tour of Dual-core Professor leads him somewhere through local singer-songwriter lyrical tradition, ironic poetics of chamber theatre and ends in a dark vision of balsamized jaw full of furious presidential wisecracks. Items in the auction catalog of artistic fakes overlap with mispronounced names of foreign meals on the menu in Czech cooking TV show. Those who expect "eye candies" will receive a sticky cake for the brain. David Helán continues to regroup misheard curatorial texts as he gathers the debris that has flooded out of thick letter soup of local art industry, induced by a wild ritual originating in Brno’s own dadaistic sense of art. Dedicated to “zaum” flavor beyond sense. Grandma's choice between an umbrella and a sewing machine. Please enter a representative exhibition of hacked appliances in Klamm-Ballast Palace.

Lumír Nykl

Futura - Center for Contemporary Art