Karolína Schön’s graduation work looks at the complex issue of burnout within the context of artistic production and feelings of uncertainty in today’s world.

How can we redefine our relationship to rest, fatigue, regeneration? What will the world look like after “The Great Exhaustion”? (The Great Burnout?)

In a world experiencing multiple crises driven by the extractive and exhausting capitalist labor of atomized individuals, Schön’s project presents stories and images from worlds where rest and relaxation are still possible despite its distorted, monstrous current form. Instead limiting herself to her own struggle with burnout, the artist delves deep into the issue in collaboration with Anna Chrtková and Matyáš Grimmich of the MONIKA art collective, which works across disciplines while using and adapting therapeutic, audiovisual, performative, and narrative practices. Together, they operate as one body, a three-headed dragon that uses text, image, action, and object as tools for creating parallel realities that might be used to simulate reality. The project draws on experimental art research practices aimed at a rejection of individualism and the fulfilment of shared dreams and desires.