Memory of Touch: Chapter II

Exhibiting artists from the Kunsthalle Praha collection: Julie Béna, Josef Bolf, Tacita Dean, Milena Dopitová, Ferenc Ficzek, Emil Filla, Robert Gabris, Milan Grygar, Klára Hosnedlová, Anna Hulačová, František Janoušek, Zhanna Kadyrova, Běla Kolářová, Stanislav Kolíbal, Julius Koller, Endre Nemes, Louise Nevelson, Roman Ondak, Otto Piene, Teodor Rotrekl, František Skála, Société Réaliste, Adriena Šimotová, Václav Špála, Toyen

Invited exhibiting artists: Kryštof Brůha, Jakub Jansa, Valentýna Janů, Natálie Perkof, Barbora Zentková & Julia Gryboś

Memory of Touch (Paměť dotyku), an exhibition unfolding in two chapters, presents the first extensive showing of the art collection of Kunsthalle Praha. Rather than treating the collection as a fixed and closed whole, it places historical, postwar and contemporary works side by side in dialogue with invited Czech artists, whose thoughts and positions open the collection outward and allow new resonances to emerge.

Memory of Touch unfolds in a time that rewards control, certainty, conflict and flawless surfaces, in a cultural landscape that celebrates efficiency and visibility while hiding what is unguarded, uncertain and imperfect. Against these imperatives, the exhibition offers a quiet counterpoint: it turns our attention to fragility and vulnerability not as deficiencies, but as expressions of resilience. To be open and to remain permeable in the face of risk is not weakness; it is a deliberate form of presence and action. From this sensitivity we enter the collection not as a linear chronology, but as a constellation of moments, impressions and echoes.

The collection of Kunsthalle Praha appears here not as a commentary on history, but as an undercurrent: quiet, persistent and formative. It places works side by side not as subjects, but as atmospheres. Not as lessons, but as pulses that ask what the past awakens in us, how it persists in memory and how it continues to shape the present. From here the exhibition turns to the invited contemporary artists, a generation shaped not by a passage from one stable world to another, but by a landscape of shifting systems, vanishing certainties and fragile forms of belonging. Not to those who repeat the forms of the past, but to those who have inherited its emotional registers: watchfulness, rupture, and the necessity of quiet endurance.

Through the collection and the invited artists, a range of dialogues emerges between intimacy and distance, discomfort and pleasure, the material and the ephemeral. These tensions establish fragility as a method rather than a theme, while the exhibition unfolds in two complementary chapters: the first examines it as a form of resistance, the second as a lived condition and presence. Together they form a single movement that connects aesthetic, historical and affective ideas. Across generations, artists fracture form, work with unstable materials and disrupt concepts to awaken an attitude that reflects worlds marked by rupture, from avant-garde experiments and postwar works shaped by censorship to contemporary practices responding to ecological, social and emotional precarity. These layered dialogues deliberately bring a broad spectrum of media into relation, including painting, drawing, installation, sculpture, photography and video, and awaken the past within the urgencies of the present. In doing so, they affirm fragility as a living language of our time: gentle, and yet resilient; uncertain, and yet fertile.

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

Chapter I