The Reality Check
by Nina Pacherová
This project can be seen this year at Circulation(s), which takes place from March 21 to May 17 in Paris, France.
The full program is available here.
The Reality Check explores how gender-based conditioning shapes female identity, desires, and life choices. Reflecting on the social expectation of motherhood, the artist traces the origins of this desire back to childhood memories of constructing an ideal family in The Sims. Using the game as a stage for domestic scenarios, Nina Pacherová examines the ambivalence of romantic relationships, which can exist both as refuge and a trap.
Working with in-game photography, she moves between the roles of player and character, creating an archive of micro-stories and glitches that echo everyday forms of gender-based violence. These images are deconstructed and transformed into digital collages, where fragmented environments reveal the symbols and hidden structures that shape women’s identities through family, social norms, and media consumed from an early age.
The project extends into an installation: a series of jacquard tapestries created in collaboration with Karolina Tomasewska, where the opposing, digital and physical worlds intertwine. A dream that never materialised is woven into a precious and lasting artefact alongside the experience of a reality check—an uncovering of one’s own conditioning. Through these works, The Reality Check questions the boundaries between upbringing and social conditioning, as well as the tension between the promise and the pressure of domestic life and motherhood.
