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.
This event is in Czech only!
This event is in Czech only!
This performance is in Czech only!
This event is in Czech only!
This performance is in Czech only.
An evening of graduation projects by third-year choreography students at the Academy of Performing Arts (HAMU). Nadkroví Barbora Sváčkov…
This performance is in Czech only!
This performace is in Czech only.
This performance is in Czech only!
This performance is in Czech only!
This performance is in Czech only!
Scamming is art. They have been with us since the beginning of mankind. They are all around us. And they are more and more of them. There´s no place you…
Scamming is art. They have been with us since the beginning of mankind. They are all around us. And they are more and more of them. There´s no place you…
This performance is in Czech only!
This performance is in Czech only!
This performance is in Czech only!
This performance is in Czech only!
This performance is in Czech only.
This performace is in Czech only.
This performance is in Czech only!
This performance is in Czech only!
This performance is in Czech only!
This performance is in Czech only!
This performance is in Czech only.
This performance is in Czech only!
This performance is in Czech only!
This performace is in Czech only.
Scamming is art. They have been with us since the beginning of mankind. They are all around us. And they are more and more of them. There´s no place you…
Scamming is art. They have been with us since the beginning of mankind. They are all around us. And they are more and more of them. There´s no place you…
This performance is in Czech only!
This performance is in Czech only.
November 29 – December 30, 2016
Both up-and-coming distinctive figures on the contemporary art scene, Tomáš Predka and David Postl met in the studio of experimental painting headed by the widely respected artist, Daniel Richter, at Vienna´s Akademie der bildenden Künste, where they were acquainted with some of the currently most relevant and critical approaches to the medium of painting. Their works oscillate around the borderlines between painting, collage and decollage, evoking the Czech tradition established there by Kolář or Štyrský, as well as the media of printmaking, drawing, and calligraphy. Reaching beyond mere adherence to the concept of visuality codified in the course of the history of modern art, they further enrich it by individual elements including the use of the latest new materials and techniques such as pasting up reflective foils or application of silk paper, pigments and paints onto canvas. Thereby, both artists create unorthodox, materially innovative paintings, assigning attractive novel outlines to a discipline that can be described as contemporary nonfigurative painting.
NoD Gallery
Tomáš Predka & David Postl: A Man Who Didn´t Take Himself Too Seriously
November 29 – December 30, 2016
Curator: Pavel Kubesa