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
Martina Smutná: Together We´ll Mow, Thresh and Deliver the Harvest
Collaboration: Kateřina Konvalinová, Max Máslo
Text: Karina Hoření
Curator: Pavel Kubesa
February 27 - April 15, 2018

The exhibition of Martina Smutná entitled Together We´ll Mow, Thresh and Deliver the Harvest tackles two subjects which continue to be approached by Czech society at large either hesitantly, or contrariwise, with a good deal of emotion and lack of restraint: namely, the issues of the status of women, and the country´s history under the communist regime. Actually, this sense of uncertainty in dealing with these two subjects may be correlated.

The general obsession with anniversaries we´ve been witnessing this year couldn´t leave unaffected the alternative cultural scene. Given this, surely the seven decades that will have passed from the events of February 1948 provide a unique example of the complexity of finding a universally acceptable story about exactly what and who from that particular era deserves the most current attention. While the mass-scale repressions unleashed in the aftermath of the communist putsch of February 1948 are unambiguously regarded as tragic, we tend to get somewhat lost in trying to explain the ensuing stage, and notably why the majority of society then failed to stand up to the outrages, and why after the Second World War its sizeable section actually embraced the country´s political swing towards the left.

The construction-oriented stage of the communist rule entailed the enforcement of a radical line in the shaping of social policies. In accord with the Marxist doctrine´s assignment of the central position in human life to work, its application to women projected most tangibly into the overriding ambition to incorporate them into the employment system. This involved the introduction of various instruments in the legislative sphere (such as the institutionalization of state-funded maternal leave, and the establishment of nurseries and kindergartens), the economic system (e.g., state support of domestic services), and the ideological superstructure (with its profusion of public space imagery displaying female crane operators, tractor drivers and the like, on recruitment posters and across the popular culture spectrum).

In reality, however, this policy geared to emancipation was never implemented: rather than taking up coveted posts as crane operators, women were assigned to poorly paid factory shop floor jobs, and neither did the promised nurseries and wide choice of ready-to-consume foodstuffs eventually prove generally available, so women ended up taking care of the kids and making home-made preserves just as they had done before, now having to do with the time left after their working hours.

To be sure, the massive propaganda campaigns promoting a new socialist type of woman never really convinced Communist party cadres at the grassroots level, and as time passed the initial radical rhetoric got to be abandoned even by the party´s top echelons. By the second half of the 1950s the previous cult of women-crane operators was supplanted by the renewed cult of women as mothers. Thus, ironically enough, central Europe became the home turf for regimes which officially proclaimed gender equality and put into practice corresponding social patterns, but which at the same time stuck to a quintessentially conservative system of values. This contradiction has since proved to be most resilient, manifesting itself still today in the lives of women who continue to be active on the job market yet who automatically return to their domestic chores as an “extra shift” after their nine-to-five workday, a situation which is moreover widely accepted as “natural” by the rest of society.

Be it as it may, any serious attempt at tackling the question of whether or not those early emancipation campaigns had a real impact on the life of society ought to focus on the mass of women´s actual everyday experience and recollections. Did women seize the opportunities they were offered, or did they rather regard them as merely illusory? Lamentably, this accumulated wealth of past experience has so far remained largely untapped by historical science, partly because it does not fall strictly within the framework defined for our study of the construction-oriented stage of the communist rule in this country. Perhaps then it will be the language of art which may yet prove to be the most appropriate vehicle for projecting the tension between our present-day vision of the communist regime and its ideology, and our recollections of life in its orbit.

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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Martina Smutná: Together We´ll Mow, Thresh and Deliver the Harvest