Diversification-exercise

Trust, Tears & Taxes

Artists: Dominik Gajarský & Janina Weißengruber

Curated by: Nela Klajbanová

The ice is melting, the debt’s on fire; a nine-to-five was never our desire.

Degrees on paper, dreams in dust; the system broke, betrayed our trust.

We studied hard, we played the game; now endless rent is all we claim.

The planet burns, the billionaires cheer; adulthood feels like drowning in fear.*

What makes a person an adult? And who gets to decide that? The exhibition Trust, Tears & Taxes is a dialogue between Czech visual artist Dominik Gajarský and Vienna-based artist Janina Weißengruber that explores the experience of coming of age in the shadow of an uncertain future. The Western world, shaped by a neoliberal logic of growth and individual responsibility – a world that, until recently, maintained a façade of stability – is unraveling. And with it, we’re forced to reevaluate the very rituals of adulthood: their meaning, timing, and consequences.

Coming of age is no longer just a biological fact or a developmental phase. It has become a cultural and political act – one that exposes the tension between personal identity and its external validation. Do we truly have control over our future, or is it already laid out for us by conditions we never chose? The body we’re born into, the social, cultural, and economic capital we do – or don’t – have access to: these are the starting lines we cannot redraw.

Biological and social determinism play a fundamental role in shaping who we become. Our starting conditions – genetic predisposition, environment, values, norms, and educational opportunities – affect not only our behavior and emotions but also how we’re perceived by society. These forces often remain invisible, yet they heavily determine our chances of succeeding in a system built on the illusion of equal opportunity.

In her drawings, Janina Weißengruber portrays adulthood through mock-ups of individualized credit cards – ironic portraits of late capitalist society. Each card is tailored to a specific target group, charting the transformation of life goals and mechanisms of debt. The credit card becomes a fetish of credibility and a tool of indebtedness, the first “adult” artifact and a symbol of social inclusion. Visual proposals are annotated with sarcastic remarks that question their legitimacy – as if even our aspirations had to pass through an approval process.

Dominik Gajarský’s photographic series captures recent art school graduates at the threshold of professional life, just before the institutional scaffolding of education disappears. The portraits, reminiscent of school yearbooks, show the faces of young people at the end of their studies – a moment that, in the dominant social narrative, marks the beginning of “adult life.” No one is smiling. The photographic gesture, typically used to stage optimism, is deliberately inverted, raising more questions than certainties. Framed by wallets and scattered coins, these photographs use ironic props to signal the adulthood to come – as if the students were being prepped for entry into a world where one’s value and identity are defined by creditworthiness.

For the exhibition, Gajarský also created a sound installation interweaving fragments of poems about debt and system pressure, pop melodies, jingling coins, and children’s rhymes – all stylized like motivational speeches about personal growth and financial responsibility. The resulting genre blend teeters between anxiety and dark humor, turning the language of certainty and strategy into grotesque.

Trust, Tears & Taxes doesn’t ask what adulthood is, but rather how it appears in a system where value is determined by credit scores and trust is validated by algorithms. It means reckoning with the fact that trust has become a luxury, tears can’t be scheduled, and taxes still come due – even when there’s nothing left to pay them with.

Text: Nela Klajbanová
*excerpts from the sound piece Trust, Tears & Taxes by Dominik Gajarský