Bad Seeds
Adam Vačkář
Curated by Jen Kratochvil
30 November 2018 — 13 January 2019

Bad Seeds reflects on the uneasy relationship between organic life and industrial production in the late neoliberal condition. Photographs taken under cold LED studio lighting depict discarded plastic packaging originally used for fruit in South Korea, a country known for excessive wrapping of everyday food products. The packaging appears together with fragments of plants: rice, maple, and bamboo, species commonly associated with the Korean landscape. These plants were not collected in nature. They were originally used by another artist during a symposium as stencils for painting and later discarded together with the plastic packaging. Vačkář retrieved these materials from the same waste stream and recomposed them into photographic still lifes. Organic remnants and consumer packaging thus meet within a shared ecology of disposal.

At the center of the exhibition stands a historic wooden table holding irregular black glass formations: residues created during the dripping and cooling of molten glass. These alien-looking shapes are by-products of glass production that cannot be recycled due to their chemical composition. While glass is commonly perceived as an ecological material, its production requires vast amounts of energy, revealing the contradictions between sustainability and industrial reality.

Installed in the former studio of the photographer Josef Sudek, the exhibition quietly reworks the tradition of still life. Where Sudek once photographed delicate arrangements of fruit and flowers, Vačkář presents still lifes shaped by packaging waste, industrial residue, and the material afterlife of artistic production. Bad Seeds thus raises a simple but unsettling question: to what extent is an ecological life still possible within a system structured by global production and waste?