Date: 23.10.2026 — 30.10.2026
Beginning: 18:00
The screening selection Soft Reset explores various techniques and rituals through which we try to regulate our emotional experience and cope with feelings of overwhelm. We might think of them much like restarting a computer: the device is returned to its basic state without its contents being erased. Many contemporary self-care practices promise something similar, namely quick relief without the need to change the conditions that overwhelm us.
Yet the title can also be read from the other side. The word “reset” evokes fundamental change, a fresh start, the erasure of whatever is not working. The qualifier “soft” softens it at the same time: only what can be changed is changed, and without major upheaval. This is how wellness and self-improvement are often presented, as a gentle and painless solution to our troubles. Soft are the towels, the voices, the affirmations and the colour palettes of the products meant to bring relief. The selection explores this tension. Some of the videos do not sit easily with softness at all: exorcism or screaming in a padded room are radical interventions into the personality, promising profound transformation. Even so, they are offered and consumed in the same way as any other self-care technique, as a service that can be ordered, tried and repeated. The question remains whether “soft” is a safeguard against real change, or its only available form.
The selected videos move between wellness practices, spiritual interventions and therapeutic methods, presenting different strategies of self-fashioning. From a luxury spa space through domestic rituals and online exorcism to a political primal scream room, a similar situation recurs: someone offers us a technique that is supposed to heal, calm or liberate. The programme as a whole thus slightly resembles teleshopping, in which every problem is an unmet need and every solution is within reach of a single call, treatment or product.
The videos experience this logic from within. With a mix of absurdity and unease, they capture moments when the search for relief becomes yet another task, and when control over our surroundings and our emotions begins to provoke anxiety itself. Responsibility for systemic problems, whether work pressure, political polarisation or inherited trauma, is shifted onto the individual, who is expected to keep working on themselves.
At the same time, the selection does not rely on critical distance alone. The videos touch on painful personal experience and ask what paths these practices offer where other ways of coping with anxiety and trauma fail.
Soft Reset thus raises questions about what we expect from these practices, what form relief can take, and where self-care begins to overlap with the pressure to constantly transform ourselves.
Ruth Waters: All of a Sudden I Began to Melt, 2023, 13’19”
The work reflects on contemporary wellness and the place it occupies in our culture and psyche. It is set in a serene massage room with a sterile atmosphere of generic ambient music, white towels and positive affirmations. The film examines the relationship between service provider and client: the fragile balance of care collapses the moment a massage client notices a talking cheese puff. What unfolds is a strange fantasy of the luxury wellness space, in which relief can be ordered, along with the anxiety that a one-off treatment is not a lasting solution.
The video is based on a recorded exorcism conducted over Skype and on found footage. The artist confronts their religious trauma from a childhood spent in the Evangelical prophetic and deliverance ministry. The Skype recording alternates with footage of religious ceremonies and with promotional videos by the exorcist, whose aesthetics recall a teleshopping offer. The film thus links the personal experience of religious trauma with the absurd forms of its mediation and commercialisation.
The video creates a futuristic version of a political primal scream room. In a grey padded room, pillows and stuffed animals bearing the logos of political parties are punched or embraced, following the methods of primal therapy. Laser invited a group of actors with opposing views on Brexit and the 2016 US presidential election. Together with life coach Valerie Bell, trained in primal therapy, she guided them to blend their personal stories with political frustrations. Laser thus transposes into political debate the primal therapy developed by the American psychologist and psychotherapist Arthur Janov in the 1970s, whose core is abreaction, the cathartic reliving of trauma. Political conflict becomes a personal wound that must be screamed out, and political frustration is treated much like childhood trauma.
Cynthia, Shana Moulton’s agoraphobic and hypochondriac alter ego, plugs into the MindPlace Thoughtstream Biofeedback System. This is a real product, a home device that measures the body’s functions through sound and light. Technology meant to help regulate inner experience becomes the starting point of Cynthia’s journey through further gadgets, from magical gloves that make objects wiggle to a dance routine set to an Activia yoghurt commercial. In kitsch New Age aesthetics and with light humour, the video follows the attempt to release bodily tension and shows how the search for relief turns into an exhausting chain of products and methods. The video is part of the series Whispering Pines.
This video is not available for online viewing.
Screening: 22. 10. 2026, 18:00 (etc. galerie, Sarajevská 16, Praha 2)
Online screening: 23.–30. 10. 2026
Curated by: Nela Klajbanová
Graphic Design: Nela Klímová
Production: Sára Märc, Tereza Vinklárková
The project is supported by the City of Prague and the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic.
The visual features a video still from All of a Sudden I Began to Melt by Ruth Waters.
