Trigger Witness

Trigger Witness explores emotional triggers as a key to unseen circumstances. Instead of understanding triggers as something negative, the project sees them as a way of revealing narratives that tend to be culturally distorted or ignored. The exhibition concept welcomes artistic forms characterized by shock – that are fragmentary, non-linear, or impossible to communicate. The poetics of the exhibited works thus results from the tension between their aesthetic form and the reality that shapes this form. The exhibition aims to not just uncover the image of reality hidden behind these works, but also to explore the tools used by the artists, so that we may better understand the works, culturally classify them, and avoid reducing them to their attractive formal or aesthetic features, which would mean denying the reality they depict.

G99 presents two original artistic explorations. In Nicole Sabella’s Trigger Happy, emotional triggers become a tool for seeing in the sense of activating a zone in which the body reacts before we can say anything. The installation’s performative and digital elements, which were created in collaboration with Joanna Zabielská and Bilal Alame, open up a hybrid field for a parallel, multiphonic reading (shaped in part by the viewers themselves) of traces left in somatic memory. In her installation made during the Brno Artists in Residence program, Alžběta Bačíková combines recordings of performances with drawings and embroidery as imaginative – but, more importantly, faithfully rendered – places where taboo events pulsate beneath the surface. Her autofictional gesture explores motifs such as family memory, healing, and the impossibility of escaping one’s origins – motifs that become triggers for storytelling.

The exhibition project Trigger Witness thematically continues research conducted in 2023–24, which focused on addictions and escape strategies under the motto Your Addiction Is the Message.