The exhibition presents the diploma work of the Spiš-born artist Erik Dulík ‒ a graduate of the Department of Fine Art and Intermedia at the Faculty of Arts at TUKE in Košice. The featured work was created under the mentorship of doc. MgA. Svetlana Fialová, ArtD. 

Paper sculptures and stalagmites bring the atmosphere of a cave to the installation. Drawing on the allegory of the cave from Plato’s Republic, Dulík “imprisons” the disinformation of the contemporary digital realm, materializing and embedding it within the walls of his cave.

The project has been developed in cooperation with the Faculty of Arts at TUKE and is presented as part of the Graduates cycle of exhibitions; it also represents the grand opening of a new and intimate subterranean exhibition space – Galéria Bunker.
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“The fabrication of untruthful stories and information is nothing new; indeed, it is an integral part of human society. The oldest recorded examples date back to ancient Roman times and, like today, that disinformation was also employed as propaganda to further political interests. The phenomena of disinformation, misinformation, hoaxes and so on has been the focus of academic interest across several different disciplines.

I decided to explore the issue of disinformation through the lens of Plato’s famous allegory of the cave. In this thought experiment, Socrates asked his students to imagine a dark cave onto whose walls shadows are projected; the people who have been living in the cave since birth would see these reflections of the real world as their reality. The cave and its inhabitants (in essence, its prisoners) represent ourselves and the world around us; a world which Socrates argued was itself not real, but merely a reflection of the world of ideas. In my opinion, this principle can be applied to the contemporary moment, in which we too must seek out the truth in a world of television, internet, exaggerated information and unverified sources. Just as Plato’s prisoners were presented with a distorted reflection of reality, we too are surrounded by warped, incomplete or deliberately suppressed half-truths which, if they are repeated for long enough, are often accepted as valid.

People have an urgent need to make a mark, to leave a trace behind them, regardless of how or where. In my work, I bring our newest marks, our “digital traces”, back to where it all started, into the world of the cave. These traces bear no resemblance to the cave paintings of the Palaeolithic era, those records of ceremonies, rituals and important events; they are instead composed of unsolicited, vapid fragments of information which “desecrate” the surrounding environment.

The stone columns which evoke the shapes of stalactites are both a response to this and an allusion to the allegory of Plato’s cave; a shadow play with a digital-information twist. The imitation stalactites are recognisably so as they emerge at their base, but they grow increasingly deformed as they descend, appearing almost amorphous, gradually diverging from reality towards abstraction.

I made the columns using a combination of shredded paper and cardboard with a little glue and wall plaster; I wanted to make the material firm and malleable, like clay. The medium of paper has long been used to facilitate communication between people. My paper columns reify misleading information in the tangible world, giving us the chance to grapple with it.”

Mgr. art. Erik Dulík
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About artist

Erik Dulík (*1998, Spišská Nová Ves) studied at the School of Applied Arts in Košice from 2014 – 2018 and later at the Faculty of Arts at TUKE in Košice from 2018 – 2024, where he completed his master’s studies in 2026.  The exhibition Cave of Echoes, held at the Gallery of Spiš Artists, is the first individual presentation of his diploma work in an academic environment.