NoD

Radek Brousil & Viktor Timofeev: The Hammer Strikes the Bell

How can one depict the city today when it is no longer merely an urban whole, but also a psychic landscape, a data infrastructure, and a space of permanent tension? And how can one grasp the metropolis at the moment when its everyday reality breaks down into layers of personal projections, collective affects, and invisible systems that shape our movements, relationships, and modes of perception? The international exhibition project The Hammer Strikes the Bell by New York-based Latvian artist Viktor Timofeev and Czech artist Radek Brousil, prepared together with curators Boris Ondreička and Pavel Kubesa for Prague’s NoD Gallery, enters precisely this field of meaning. Here, the city does not appear as a stable backdrop, but as a living, multilayered organism in which subjective experience collides with the logic of late-postmodern infrastructures. The joint project by Brousil and Timofeev is conceived as a complex exhibition situation in which images, drawings, and a spatial site-specific installation are interwoven into a scenographic whole. The exhibition reflects the specific chronotope of the metamodern gigapolis — a city that is simultaneously a concrete place and a mental state, a set of material structures and a field of imagination. The artists are interested in the intricate image of buildings, people, technologies, and collective psyche that emerges from the structures of today’s metropolises. The exhibition is therefore not built on a mere dialogue between two media or two artistic signatures. More important is the very nature of their encounter: both Brousil and Timofeev have long cultivated a sensitivity to what remains beneath the surface of the visible world, whether power regimes, infrastructures, cultural codes, or unspoken models of identity. From this perspective, The Hammer Strikes the Bell transforms the gallery space into a situation in which the city becomes not only a theme, but also a method. The viewer does not enter a closed narrative, but rather a mutable scenery in which a wide range of individual and collective dramas may unfold. Viktor Timofeev (*1984), whose practice clearly extends beyond the framework of Central and Eastern Europe, is an internationally established artist living and working in New York, whose interdisciplinary practice brings together drawing, painting, video, sound, software, and experimental games into complex environments situated at the intersection of autofiction, worldbuilding, and systems thinking. In 2025, he presented his most extensive museum exhibition to date, Other Passengers, at the Latvian National Museum of Art in Riga; he has also exhibited at the Hessel Museum of Art in New York, Bozar in Brussels, and the National Gallery in Prague. Radek Brousil (*1980) enters this dialogue as an artist who has long reflected on the relationship between image, material, and social reality. In his post-photographic approach, he combines photography with textile, object, video, installation, and painting, and consistently engages with socio-political and environmental themes, postcolonial tendencies, and the question of a “new sensibility.” His work grows out of a critical relationship to standardized interpretations of late capitalism, the Anthropocene, and global power relations, and has increasingly also turned toward the politics of time. Brousil is among the notable figures of the Czech art scene with strong international experience, as confirmed by his projects in London, Brussels, Budapest, Tokyo, and other institutions.

Ladislav Tejml: Everything’s Gonna Be Alright 3
Video NoD, 360° projection, 3D animace
February 16 - March 17, 2017
Curator: Veronika Zajačiková

Either the world is heading into dark tomorrows, or perhaps we may only be indulging in an exciting catastrophic fiction. We may either manage to extricate ourselves from the grip of that virtual anaconda, or it may prove to be enough if we just loosen our belts? Are these sleeve covers real, or a somewhat more powerful influx of metainformation? Is this text written by a human, or have I bought new shoes?

The project Everything´s Gonna Be Alright 3 is based on works Click by Click (web application, 2015) and Everything´s Gonna Be Alright 1 and 2 (2015, 2016). Tejml works with 3D animation, internet application (web design) and video games environment with its rules. Author creates 3D virtual world, which is typical for computer video games and it evolves at 360° panoramic video projection.

The project Everything´s Gonna Be Alright 3 is a loose sequel to my previous works reflecting on contemporary society. The accelerated modern society can be likened to a marsh: the faster it revves up its wheels, the faster it immerses and dissolves in time´s fluidity. The growing speed results in roadside traffic signs becoming illegible. Thus if we pass by the signs in a fully loaded lorry, with the gas pedal on full throttle, we can hardly tell which way will lead us towards the bog, and nor can we be expected to be able to bring the lorry to a standstill before reaching the bog´s edge. Even as it is, the lorry is already running behind schedule, as a material click can be managed in a matter of seconds. One always needs to find a way of orienting oneself, the gelatinous brain matter keeps thinning down, and the GPS is showing us the correct route which, however, can easily be manipulated or controlled. If we don´t find enough time to stop at a sign, to inquisitively assess the correctness of our direction, and will instead rely on algorithms, which we have found helpful after all, the outcome will bring about ideal conditions for applications of populism. In its turn, populism results in a division of society into ones and zeros. Indeed, in a time brimming with worries this simple variant, digestible for everyone, in the form of the binary option of yes/no, is plausible enough. And yet, in the space between these two isolated bubbles can be found a whole scale of further options. Fuzzy logic happens to be a productive example of this, offering a system that does without elements defined in terms of ones and zeros, but rather counts with the existence of some sort of intermediate points which merely approximate the limits. Maybe the world has gone mad for good, but that in itself doesn´t prevent us from being able to find reasonable ways of moving from one place to another. And yet, a sense of orientation is not everything we might wish. All the less so in fact if the rudder wheel is in the grip of a pirate with a combover who has no problem whatsoever with unpredictable, fast and sudden shifts in weather. At a time when we feel overwhelmed by everything that´s unacceptable, unimaginable and unavoidable, deep down there still remains an underlying hope that once everything´s going to be alright. Perhaps without this hope we wouldn´t be able to go on living.

Ladislav Tejml
*2012 - now Atelier Multimedia (Slavo Krekovič), Faculty of Fine Arts, VUT University, Brno
Exhibition (selection):
Láva, National Gallery of Iceland, Reykjavik, Iceland
Generation smart, National Library of Technology, Praha, Czech Republic
Meet Czech Design, H. Týrlová Atelier, Zlín, Czech Republic
Maska - Videomapping festival, Baťas institut 14/15, Zlín, Czech Republic
Specialization: 3D animation (PC games), interactive audiovisual installation, sound, web applications

http://ladislawtejml.wixsite.com/ladislavtejml

JÁ, DIAGNÓZA / + - VeDvou

Radek Brousil & Viktor Timofeev: The Hammer Strikes the Bell

MICHAELŮV MASHUP

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27 LITRŮ UMĚLÝ KRVE / Janek & Natálka & kol.

27 LITRŮ UMĚLÝ KRVE / Janek & Natálka & kol.

MICHAELŮV MASHUP

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ŠPIONI / Brémy

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SCAMMERS ATTACK / Janek & Natálka & collective

FAKE CRIME / Joke Division

THE LEGEND OF LUNETIC / Janek & Natálka & kol.

THE LEGEND OF LUNETIC / Janek & Natálka & kol.

THE LEGEND OF LUNETIC / Janek & Natálka & kol.

27 LITRŮ UMĚLÝ KRVE / Janek & Natálka & kol.

27 LITRŮ UMĚLÝ KRVE / Janek & Natálka & kol.

27 LITRŮ UMĚLÝ KRVE / Janek & Natálka & kol.

UNDERGROUND COMEDY CLUB

JAK SE DĚLÁ DIVADLO / Divadlo MASO

THE LEGEND OF LUNETIC / Janek & Natálka & kol.

THE LEGEND OF LUNETIC / Janek & Natálka & kol.

THE LEGEND OF LUNETIC / Janek & Natálka & kol.

FAKE CRIME / Joke Division

UNDERGROUND COMEDY CLUB

27 LITRŮ UMĚLÝ KRVE / Janek & Natálka & kol.

27 LITRŮ UMĚLÝ KRVE / Janek & Natálka & kol.

27 LITRŮ UMĚLÝ KRVE / Janek & Natálka & kol.

THE LEGEND OF LUNETIC / Janek & Natálka & kol.

THE LEGEND OF LUNETIC / Janek & Natálka & kol.

JAK SE DĚLÁ DIVADLO / Divadlo MASO

SCAMMERS ATTACK / Janek & Natálka & collective

SCAMMERS ATTACK / Janek & Natálka & collective

JÁ, DIAGNÓZA / + - VeDvou

FAKE CRIME / Joke Division

UNDERGROUND COMEDY CLUB

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VIDEO NoD: Ladislav Tejml - Everything’s Gonna Be Alright 3