Phantom

Opening Thursday 10.9.2026

Guided tour 8.10. at 6 p.m.

Curator Tomáš Dvořák

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

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

The central element of the exhibition is a video created inside a digital reconstruction of the studio. The space was modelled from surviving images of the burned building through a combination of photogrammetry, manual modelling and texturing. As a result the film shows an unsettling closeness to the images it grows out of: we see the same shelves, fallen beams and twisted papers, but now rotated in space and viewed from angles no camera ever recorded. A place has thus been assembled solely from the documentary traces of its own destruction. The work unfolds precisely in the shift between photograph and digital double, familiar yet foreign, indexical yet synthetic.

A single continuous shot glides through the space. The camera's path was not animated by hand but generated algorithmically. Over the course of the film the camera gradually inhabits a series of different bodies, none of which is ever seen. It suddenly stops, accelerates, and changes height and position, blurring whose gaze it mediates: an animal's, a machine's, a voyeur's, or a ghost's. It moves through the studio the way memory moves through a place that no longer exists, patiently and without a body.

Alongside the video the exhibition presents a new photographic work that follows Sudek's portraits of veiled figures. Its starting point is the male figure from the stone sculpture Lovers (1961) by Eva Krsková, which still stands in Prague's Stromovka park, a park Sudek photographed throughout his life. Here the veiled figure does not appear as a mere subject but as a witness: whatever the fabric hides, it also 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, recalling a leitmotif in Sudek's work, becomes a threshold between subject and apparition, and on the anniversary of the photographer's death also a mourning veil. Veiling thus becomes the very condition of any apparition.

Phantom moves on the border between archaeology and simulation, between the indexical trace of analogue photography and the spectral logic of the 3D image. Drawing on Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx and David Claerbout's notion of the “synthetic image”, the project asks what remains when an image ceases to be testimony. It does not handle the past nostalgically; it approaches it as an active, living layer that shapes how we see, and examines how spectrality persists as a structural condition of perception itself.

Scene in the Studio

In 1844 William Henry Fox Talbot included in his book The Pencil of Nature a photograph titled “Scene in a Library”. It shows several shelves of books, a simple still life that almost reads as a catalogue of objects. In the context of the book, however, his commentary is somewhat puzzling, even out of place: instead of describing the picture, he develops a reflection on invisible rays and on a camera capable of seeing what remains hidden from the human eye.

“Among the many new ideas prompted by the discovery of photography is the following somewhat peculiar experiment or speculation. I have never tried it myself, nor do I know of anyone who has attempted or proposed it; yet I believe that if properly carried out it could not fail to succeed.

When a ray of sunlight is refracted by a prism and falls on a screen, it forms a beautiful band of colour known as the solar spectrum.

Experimenters have found that when this spectrum falls on a sheet of sensitive paper, the violet end produces the strongest effect; and what is truly remarkable, a similar effect…”