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.

NoD Gallery
Jan Pfeiffer: Two Rules for One Thing
Curator: Pavel Kubesa

Jan Pfeiffer has established himself as an artist working with diverse formats of creating complex signal situations thematizing different semantic contexts. His works abound in historical, mythological, religious and cultural connotations of both specific sites and purely abstract, even anthropological archetypal motifs. Pfeiffer´s visual morphology elaborates the semantic options offered by various sets of basic geometric shapes and develops them in a process aimed at unfolding their broader interpretational potential and a dramatization of symbolic narratives. A common denominator of Pfeiffer´s output is a shared, characteristic mood, an externalized individual sensitivity which determines the nature and language of his approach to individual subjects. Pfeiffer´s narratives thus induce the feeling of a seemingly gentle yet at the same time firm handshake, a physical contact straddling in terms of effect the borderline between a tender stroke and the act of moulding of material, either sculptural or human, represented by spectators.

The project entitled Two Rules for One Thing exemplifies Pfeiffer´s idiom in its handling of correlations between willpower, object and shape, and the limits set on its use. In the work´s unfoiling threedimensional narrative, the prime instrument of communication consists in the repetitive occurrence of the motif of a sinusoid. Its variations are employed with a view to articulating an intricate web of ideas building up a metaphor of the process of human deliberation.

The core of Pfeiffer´s situation consists in approaching the human individual as an active element continuously confronted with sets of either external or internal rules, as well as with a specific set of personal aspirations and capacities geared towards actually making rules, with a view to getting a proper grasp of things. For Pfeiffer, a model situation is represented there by the act of entering into landscape and its ensuing structuring by choreographed individual or collective human movement. The movement he has in mind can be either internal (driven by decision-making, alternative choice, and physical impulses), or external, in terms of actual space-related definitions of direction or limitation. In real life, different strategies and different institutions happen to construct landscape using diverse instruments of mobility. The surface of landscape-as-material-object, with its embedded content of deposited strata of minerals and soil, is overlaid by sediments of ambition and power taking the forms of instructions, restrictions and control mechanisms. The amount of space available for the manifestation of (predominantly physical) movement has been dwindling, for the sake of unidirectional corridors of action which ultimately set the rules. The actual width of the corridors within which we are able to structure our movement ultimately depends on our choice of the game which we have decided to play, or which we have been made to play.

By his own choice of a staged and choreographed approach, however, Pfeiffer focuses primarily on the question of individual, internal action, using the device of animating the spectator´s movement through the physical space of the gallery. There, the unconditional repetition of the sinusoid (i.e., the rule) in the form of landscape sketches of the morphology of hill-shaped reliefs in black-and-white ink drawings (diversifying this formal limitation by varying contents) in the gallery´s first section confronts the spectator with the need to make a decision: namely, whether or not to try and force their way past this large object wedged between the gallery´s walls. The suggestion of this kind of formal openness involving the need to enter the work in the literal, physical sense, enables Pfeiffer to set into motion a simulation of the decision-making process, complete with its elements of determination and taking the first step. Letting into play the physical experience of bowing one´s head, an action required for getting through and past the object, he moreover achieves a visualization of a metaphor of humility vis-a-vis this “rite of passage” to the physical experience of a rule.

The show´s second section opens up before the spectator the sight of a more loosely structured composition featuring instances of variation and plurality, as well as symbiosis of different rules (either formal, or content-wise) applied to one thing. An interesting role is played here by two photographs of hands which, as metaphors of “grasping”, point to the cognitive fact that form alone can be instrumental in decision-making, offering itself as a “perceived alternative,” showing the way. Similarly, what was initially a comparatively inaccessible landscape is now seen for the first time from the other side, where it is treated in an entirely different way. In the exhibition´s last room, the original thing is divided, detached from the rules of form, turned inside out, its averted sides now giving shape to a new landscape element: a corridor, or fissure, which at its far end sets in motion a dialogue-style play of rules involving the use of a six-minute short film re-enacting the movements and unaccomplished conversation between two actors who stand in “the same place”, without ever actually meeting. It may seem that the installation´s end point thus suggests the idea of a unified, communal use of a particular space, the aspiration to a union which, however, is for the time being still unattainable.

JÁ, DIAGNÓZA / + - VeDvou

Radek Brousil & Viktor Timofeev: The Hammer Strikes the Bell

MICHAELŮV MASHUP

27 LITRŮ UMĚLÝ KRVE / Janek & Natálka & kol.

27 LITRŮ UMĚLÝ KRVE / Janek & Natálka & kol.

27 LITRŮ UMĚLÝ KRVE / Janek & Natálka & kol.

MICHAELŮV MASHUP

FAKE CRIME / Joke Division

MICHAELŮV MASHUP

UNDERGROUND COMEDY CLUB

HAMU Graduate Choreography Showcase

ŠPIONI / Brémy

JÁ, DIAGNÓZA / + - VeDvou

JAK SE DĚLÁ DIVADLO / Divadlo MASO

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.

THE LEGEND OF LUNETIC / Janek & Natálka & kol.

SCAMMERS ATTACK / Janek & Natálka & collective

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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Jan Pfeiffer: Two Rules for One Thing