Phantom

opening Thursday, September 10, 2026

curator-led tour October 8 at 6 PM

curator Tomáš Dvořák

Phantom, a new site-specific installation by visual artist Hynek Alt, will open at the Josef Sudek Studio in Prague on September 10, 2026.

The project was created for the 50th anniversary of Josef Sudek's death and returns to the place of the photographer's work, a modest wooden structure hidden behind a garden wall in Prague's Újezd. The original building burned down in the past and was demolished; the building that stands on the site today and hosts the gallery is its faithful replica. Phantom returns to the moment just before this demolition, to the ruin at the moment of its demise, and reconstructs it as both a physical structure and a metaphysical state.

The central element of the exhibition is a video created within a digital reconstruction of the studio. The space was modeled from preserved images of the burned-out building by combining photogrammetry, manual modeling, and texturing. As a result, the film exhibits an unsettling proximity to the images from which it originates: we see the same shelves, fallen beams, and twisted papers, but this time rotated in space and viewed from angles that no camera ever captured. This created a place assembled exclusively from documentary traces of its own destruction. It is in the shift between the photograph and its digital double, familiar yet alien, indexical yet synthetic, that the entire work unfolds.

A single fluid, uninterrupted shot moves through the space. The camera's path was not animated manually but generated algorithmically. During the film, the camera gradually inhabits a series of different bodies, none of which are seen. It suddenly stops, accelerates, and changes height and position, thus obscuring whose gaze it mediates: that of an animal, a machine, a voyeur, or a ghost. It passes through the studio in the way memory moves through a place that no longer exists, patiently and disembodied.

Alongside the video, the exhibition presents a new photographic work that builds on Sudek's portraits of veiled figures. The starting point is the male figure from the stone sculpture Lovers (1961) by Eva Krsková, which still stands in Prague's Stromovka, a park that Sudek photographed throughout his life. The veiled figure here does not appear merely as a subject, but as a witness: what the fabric hides, it simultaneously watches over. The image, conceived as a spatial object rather than a flat photograph, reveals itself only partially and keeps the rest to itself. The veil, alluding to a leitmotif in Sudek's work, becomes a threshold between subject and revelation, and on the anniversary of the photographer's death, also a mourning shroud. Veiling thus becomes the very condition of any revelation.

Phantom moves between archaeology and simulation, between the indexical trace of analogue photography and the spectral logic of a 3D image. Following Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx and David Claerbout's concept of the “synthetic image,” the project asks what remains when an image ceases to be a testimony. It does not treat the past nostalgically but approaches it as an active, living layer shaping our view, and explores how phantasmagoria persists as a structural condition of perception itself.