The Eye of the Storm – the overarching concept of this year’s diploma exhibition at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague – refers to the centre of a cyclone, where the weather is calm and the wind is gentle. The Academy’s environment sometimes tends toward such a microclimate. In the studio, just as in the vortex of a hurricane, we may find calm and quiet, in contrast to the destructive force of wind and torrential rain swirling around.

As an exhibition, The Eye of the Storm focuses on the studio as a space, where expectations and creative tension mix with a stream of thoughts, feelings, fragments of the past and imagination. This swirling vortex settles at first in pencil sketches and our encounters with material, before the artwork takes on concrete form. The eye itself represents clarity – deeper insight but also the omnipresence of mimesis – the prioritisation of sight over other ways of knowledge-forming. When we make art, while focusing on ourselves, we often subconsciously turn to the multilayered systems and relationships of our own and other worlds. Seeing, however, is only one of many aspects of this process. When ideas and their resolution arrive, time flows differently; sometimes it slips through our fingers, other times it stretches out and the atmosphere thickens. Much like in a storm, there is a rapture and a degree of unpredictability in art – the promise and anticipation of something new are often contingent upon the destruction of what lies in the way.

Nowadays, there is a way in which we experience a similar kind of rapture through our endless interactions with the screens. There, too, lies a certain kind of timelessness, in whose strangeness we forget the value of our time and attention, and their scarcity. A chatbot provides comfort: it can complete or even compose an essay, help you analyse and calm turbulent emotions or write that email you’ve been putting off for so long. Every prompt oscillates within abstracted networks and data centre infrastructure, within the predictions of linguistic models, until it offers a personalised solution. Meanwhile, in the background, hectolitres of water move quietly, cooling your mind as it also cools the networks of infrastructure and data centres. In a thought storm of swirling memes, reports from the war zones of Ukraine, Palestine, Iran and elsewhere, videos of looksmaxxing and adverts for lip fillers, ChatGPT offers us, with its sycophantic personalisation, tailor-made solutions – anticipated even before we think of them ourselves – making sense out of our scattered thoughts.

How can we find focus and clarity, and how can we ensure it is truly our own? Where can we find a moment of renewal? Much like the entire weather system of a storm, shaped by climatic conditions, winds and geology, artificial intelligence is something that disrupts our thinking about human scale. For Timothy Morton, artificial intelligence – just like the weather, satellite networks, or radioactivity – is a hyperobject: an interconnection of multiple systems, concepts and networks, without a fixed location; ahistorical, yet intertwined with the daily life. The position of hyperobjects is abstract in both time and space and defies simple categorisation, as they are often experienced only in parts, fragmentarily; a storm is an effect of global warming, which connects the planet’s history with complex, human-made changes. Likewise, our time at the art academy – shaped by the entire edifice of art history and its aesthetic tradition – become, for some students, a daily reality for up to six years after their initial adaptation to the studio ‘climate’ of the Academy of Fine Arts.

Apart from exceptional events, our daily experience of the weather and going to the Academy’s studio becomes, to a certain extent, mundane. Similarly, our interactions with artificial intelligence become so routine that we forget the enormity of the processes and changes in the background that shape our new experience of the world. To a certain extent, we are always simultaneously micro and macro, filling the entire planet, omnipresent, intertwined in infrastructure and images; our lives saturating with datasets while the human experience expands in models and visualisations of space and time.

Only as a result of extreme events – when a tornado destroys a village in South Moravia or the Grok AI app strips bare someone we know intimately – do we recognise what has profoundly changed. In this sense, it is a crisis of the human scale: our sense of omnipresence is replaced by helplessness in the face of the complexity of relationships and networks. In a crisis, our sense of control suddenly reveals itself to be illusory. In abstract systems that we are unable to grasp or control, our presence becomes microscopic, like raindrops carrying traces of plutonium. In the moments of profound anxiety from this scale shift, artificial intelligence offers a tailor-made solace: immediate, optimised and automated acceptance.

In the microclimate inside the eye of the storm, the time of change is often barely perceptible. Unlike interactions with a chatbot, art – and by extension, such an important event as a diploma exhibition – does not always provide immediate answers and instant gratification. In the artistic process, the moment of clarity and promise – or satisfaction with one’s own work – is fleeting and unpredictable. Like the wind in a storm, it departs as quickly as it arrives, beyond our control. Sometimes this feeling arises through sharing with others during the diploma exhibition; other times it emerges unexpectedly, a few years after graduating from art school. The wind, however, is always a reminder that there is a concrete landscape somewhere, forming the atmospheric conditions of its origin. The works in the diploma exhibition stem not only from an idea but also from the possibilities of material realisation, including financial ones.

The curatorial intention of this year’s exhibition is to nurture an artistic microclimate, a space that allows for the culmination of the diploma students long-term thinking. In a certain sense, this year’s ‘weather’ at the Academy is reflected in the emphasis on the materiality and abundance of sculpture, but also in the prevalence of sound-based installation. Perhaps as a response to the easy accessibility, production and automation of images, this year’s diploma students have moved beyond a simple appropriation of images from the digital world. In this respect, Denisa Michalinová’s text The Infrastructure of Dislocated Reality, written specifically for this publication, reflects on artistic strategies outside the binary rejection or mindless acceptance of artificial intelligence.

The world of automatically generated and shared images does not go away. On the contrary, it is ubiquitous. However, it is more often subjected to purposeful deconstruction or manual processing in the form of chance or a personal response to the multitude of stimuli on offer. The present oversaturation manifests in our relationship to the things that surround us and their ownership. The abundance of personal items – treated as surplus goods that we accumulate, and which often become waste the moment they are purchased – determines, to a certain extent, this current generation’s material perception of the world. Reflections on this oversaturation also define our relationship to the body. Images of all varieties of bodies, pornography and sex have never been so accessible. At the same time, we are disciplined daily by visual streams of “perfect” bodies. In this sense, the bodies in the diploma students’ works often push the boundaries of the grotesque, drawing on the traditions of queer and feminist art.

Building on the frequently recurring questions that art practice brings forward, this publication offers some answers that also emerged from discussions and personal meetings with the diploma students. With Piotr Sikora, we intentionally posed questions that can be considered banal, yet are all the more complicated for it. What has become exhausted and boring in art or architecture today, even though we still see it in the art scene? The answers, edited by Elena Pecenová, are here as a form of a generational survey, an uncertain statistic.

Should art be beautiful and what is ugly? Does six years at the Academy of Fine Art change one’s thinking about these categories? After the twentieth century, exhausted by its constant attempts at novelty, is it possible to rebel today only through repetition? This year’s diploma students are reworking icons ranging from Michael Jordan to St. Hubert, spiritual symbols and references to art history; they collect used materials and let dust settle on artworks. But does it even make sense to make art when the world is on fire and even the most intimate forms of experience, such as love, are being automated? The onslaught of images, commodities and sensations leads others toward introspection: return to memory, observing the landscape, seeking inner balance, personal forms of spirituality.

Leaving the Academy of Fine Arts marks a new phase of life for graduating students and in this sense, the preparation of the exhibition is a very close to the anticipation of the storm. At the time of writing (March 2026), we are witnessing an attack on independent culture both here and in neighbouring countries – what will the weather be like for the emerging generation of artists? The storm, as energy, flows through our bodies into the planetary. Wind, fans, gusts in the metro, wind turbines, Wuthering Heights… throughout the exhibition’s preparation and in our joint meetings, we were looking for pauses and interruptions, for moments of lightness. How to blow-dry your hair while taking a selfie for the catalogue? When thinking about the future, those moments rise up, as in Filip Brandejský’s response to the question of as-yet-unfulfilled artistic ambitions:

Like every great artist before me, I plan to create my own self-portrait, but so far, I haven’t dared to make something so spectacularly dreadful and scary. Perhaps that will be a mercy for future generations.

The Eye of the Storm tries to capture a fleeting moment of intimate artistic experience in the Academy’s studios, in the promise and space made by sharing. Credit for creating this space goes primarily to diploma students and their teachers, but also everyone at the AVU who contributed to The Eye of the Storm, particularly the exhibition’s production team: Veronika Zapatová, Vít Novák, Eva Ellingerová, Piotr Sikora and Vlasta Elmerová.

Together, we hope that the diploma show will open such spaces beyond established perspectives: unpredictable weather, mapping future potential, possibilities of transformation while taking risks. There is also a place here for disappointment, which, unlike automation, is an integral part not only of art but also of authentic human relationships. It is a place which is to an extent necessary – a lack of disappointment would only mean that our hopes weren’t high enough.