In the new episode of the HIDDEN Podcast, we meet painters and sculptors Martin Kolář and Matěj Pokorný in their joint exhibition HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE at (A)VOID Gallery. Built around Sartre’s famous proposition that hell is other people, the exhibition explores the uneasy relationship between people, the gaze of others, violence, technology and the human body.

The two artists created the exhibition through an unusual process of mutual influence. They visited each other’s studios, responded to each other’s ideas and gradually began transforming and reinterpreting each other’s motifs. The result deliberately blurs the boundary between original and copy, painting and sculpture, human and non-human.

Kolář speaks about his move away from pop-cultural references towards figures and forms that emerge directly from his imagination, his interest in toxic human relationships and the way violence and sexuality remain embedded in his work. Pokorný discusses his fascination with bones, biological structures and the physical resistance of sculpture, as well as his experiments with concrete, asphalt, silicon and other materials of civilisation.

We also talk about the human body as a last remaining form of resistance to technological optimisation, the possibility of imagining non-human intelligence, ancient Mesopotamian imagery, cyberpunk, artificial intelligence, destruction as part of the artistic process, and why both artists see the current exhibition less as a prediction of the future than as a reflection of the strange present we already inhabit.