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.

Galerie NoD
Tim Plamper
EXIT II (The Beloved Dies)
Curated by: Pavel Kubesa
Text by: Lisa Moravec
28. 7. - 20. 8. 2021

Opening Performance: 28. 7. 2021, 18:00-22:00

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Lisa Moravec: Exit - Nothing there to figure out

Nothing there to figure out. To configure. No secret love shed in the pleasure garden. That feeling of security. An affective distance. A blank space. A human animal body, abstracted from its inner world. Cold, distanced, alienated.

In The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Hakim Bey reminds us to never mind what is impossible. “What else can we hope to attain but the ‘impossible’? Should we wait for someone else to reveal our true desires?”

Tell that to the Tiger.

The aesthetics of Tim Plamper’s Exit II (The Beloved Dies) takes an uncanny shot at sexual attraction. Despite its romantic, cinematic aesthetic – the displayed bodies bath in states of twilight and in natural environments – the second film of his cycle EXIT II explores the impossibility to grasp intimacy, the human figure, its externalized intersubjective and embodied condition. The Beloved Dies projects, without showing, a feeling that is only felt when warm flesh touches flesh, placing soft skin on skin.

Naked bodies take center stage in wild nature scenes. They are neither entangled with each other, nor with nature. They perform within it, and are yet separate entities. Organic unison is suspended, remains unrealized. The beloved dies afloat, in a third, imaginative space, framed by bodily poetics.

Loss is not a lonely affair, but a process of re-growing. Intimate sensations do not exist. They cannot be sustained, so they cannot die either. Loss and distance, like craving and longing, are both un/desirable. Eros amalgamates thinking and desire, and generates, Byung-Chul Han suggests, ‘an atopic Other’. An object of desire that was once attractive, perhaps was even unbearably hot, has also always been beyond reach, opaque, existed outside of representable forms.

Comparison kills lovers. The idea of a beloved one is always dying, prone to entropy, to that very loss of attachment and dependency. The process of dying transforms it into a processual kind of love. A feeling of being loved, devoted to something else, is not of literal qualities. But it is also not necessarily expressed as sexual desire.

The beloved remains, invisible, it stays alive, inside. It can transverse boarders. A surrealist desire for liberation, driven by the desire to extend one’s own habitat, to become one with an other, through touch. The love for someone is not comparable with self-love. Touching oneself is not equal to touching someone. If I touch a person, I feel my body, moving, out of itself. At this edge, the body becomes one, with something else. Intimacy is an instant that is not haunted by loss, but by its embodiment. The body as vessel, as a creative source for future visions.

In Plamper’s film, Exit II (The Beloved Dies), sexualized bodies are not touching. Their transcorporeal substance materializes also as a transsexual relation. The performers observe themselves, while they are acting. The animal-like humans are not genderless characters, they are specifically sexed figures. They do not totally lose themselves in each other. They resist the temptation, for the sake of self-preservation.

Exit II (The Beloved Dies) offers an abstracted narrative. It is not a passionate love story. Through sensuous pleasures, the film creates meaning at the threshold of subsuming ordinariness. Tim Plamper gestures towards the risk it takes to leap into the vortex of the unknown. Elusiveness included, free fall becomes possible. In sight of death, love can run, smoothly, like liquid, in many different directions.

Lisa Moravec

JÁ, DIAGNÓZA / + - VeDvou

Radek Brousil & Viktor Timofeev: The Hammer Strikes the Bell

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TIM PLAMPER: EXIT II (The Beloved Dies)