Memory of Touch: Chapter I

Exhibiting artists from the Kunsthalle Praha Collection: Zbyněk Baladrán, Jiří Černický, Agnes Denes, Emil Filla, Tomislav Gotovac, Milan Knížák, Jiří Kolář, Běla Kolářová, Jitka Kolínská, Eva Koťátková, Jiří Kovanda, Bohumil Kubišta, Heinz Mack, Frank Joseph Malina, Ján Mančuška, Haroon Mirza, Jaromír Novotný, Theodor Pištěk, Marie Rychlíková, Edita Schubert, Kurt Schwitters, Zbyněk Sekal, Ira Svobodová, Jindřich Štyrský, Goran Trbuljak

Invited exhibiting artists: Jakub Choma, Lukáš Hofmann, Igor Hosnedl, Valentýna Janů, Marie Lukáčová, Roman Štětina

The exhibition Memory of Touch, unfolding in two chapters, is the first comprehensive presentation of the Kunsthalle Praha Collection. The exhibition presents the collection as an open entity, placing modernist, post-war, and contemporary works in dialogue with invited artists from the Czech scene. The ideas and attitudes of the invited artists open the collection outwards and evoke new resonances. These dialogues, moreover, take place at a time when control, certainty, conflict, and flawless appearance are prioritized – in a cultural environment that values efficiency and visibility, while concealing what is unprotected, uncertain, and imperfect. The exhibition thus offers a quiet counterpoint to the aforementioned imperatives and turns our gaze towards fragility and vulnerability – not as shortcomings, however, but as gestures of resilience. Openness and the courage to take risks are not weaknesses here, but a conscious choice of one's own presence in the given moment. From this position of sensitivity, we then enter the collection through a non-chronological constellation of moments, impressions, and echoes.

The exhibition title, which originated during a conversation with invited artist Valentýna Janů in her studio, connects Chapter I and II and simultaneously suggests that the past is not merely a distant abstraction. Rather, it is something that resides in the body, in material, in touch or gesture; it remains as a residue on surfaces and in the ways we approach or withdraw, remember or forget. Memory of Touch: Chapter I is dedicated to fragility and vulnerability as aesthetic and political strategies that reveal themselves through the conceptual, visual, and material dimensions of the artwork. We do not consider them passive states, but active forces through which artists of various generations deconstruct and transform forms and ideas to respond to the instability of the world. This creates resonances between early avant-garde experiments, post-war practices marked by censorship or repression, and contemporary works, especially those by invited artists. Their works mirror today's state of uncertainty through disordered narratives, unstable materials, and fragmented bodies.

The connection of works in this chapter leaves meanings open – as a quiet space in which touch does not end on the skin but persists as a memory, a trace, and a possibility of the existence of another world.

A multilingual audio guide, created in collaboration with Kunsthalle Praha and the Cabinet of Wonders platform, will be available to visitors during the exhibition.

Exhibition program

Gallery

Kunsthalle Praha Collection