Memory of Touch: Chapter I

Memory of Touch, an exhibition unfolding across two successive chapters, is the first major exploration of the Kunsthalle Praha Collection. It treats the collection as an open and evolving entity and sets historical, post-war, and contemporary works in dialogue with invited artists from the Czech scene, allowing their ideas and attitudes to open the collection outward and generate new resonances. These dialogues are taking place in a time that rewards control, certainty, conflict, and immaculate surfaces – a cultural landscape that celebrates efficiency and visibility while concealing what is unguarded, tentative, and imperfect. The exhibition offers a quiet counterpoint to such imperatives, turning our gaze towards fragility and vulnerability – not as shortcomings but as gestures of resilience. Being open and remaining exposed to risk is not a weakness; it is a conscious choice to be present. From this position of sensitivity, we enter the collection through a non-chronological constellation of moments, impressions, and echoes.

The exhibition’s title, which took shape at the very beginning of the project during a conversation with the invited artist Valentýna Janů in her studio, connects chapters I and II while also suggesting that history is not a distant abstraction. Rather, it is something that resides in the body, in the material, in the touch and gesture; it remains as a residue on the surfaces and in the ways we approach or withdraw, remember or forget. Memory of Touch: Chapter I is devoted to fragility and vulnerability as aesthetic and political strategies that are revealed through the conceptual, visual, and material dimensions of an artwork. We do not think of them as passive states but as active forces through which artists of different generations deconstruct and reshape forms and ideas in order to respond to the instability of the world. Resonances arise between early avant-garde experiments, post-war practices marked by censorship and repression, and contemporary works, especially by the invited artists. Their creations mirror today’s uncertainties through disordered narratives, unstable materials, and fragmented bodies. The interweaving of works in this chapter leaves meanings open – like a silent space in which touch does not end on the skin but persists as a memory, a trace, and the possibility of a different world.

During the exhibition, visitors will have access to a multilingual audioguide created in collaboration between Kunsthalle Praha and the Cabinet of Wonders platform.