GUIDE
Biennale Matter of Art 2026

The Fůd platform is a space for socially engaged illustration and comics which was created in 2015 by illustrators Barbora Tögel, Veronika Homolová, and Barbora Müllerová. It focuses on publishing magazines and zines, producing exhibitions, giving lectures, and creating opportunities for socially engaged artists from around the world to meet and share their expertise. Through exhibitions in cafés or, for example, in community centers, it has long sought to bring topics related to feminism, queer people, environmentalism, mental health, social inequality, and xenophobia to the forefront of public debate; in recent years, Fůd has also addressed the challenges of working as a socially engaged illustrator. As the main theme of the publication for the Biennale Matter of Art, the editors chose the topic of “daily bread”—the conditions under which artists in various regions live and create and the everyday obstacles they must overcome along the way.

The collaboration with Fůd is part of the curatorial strategy of this year’s biennale. This strategy focuses on sharing curatorial responsibility and expanding our understanding of what artistic practice is and what form an art biennale can take. Instead of the usual catalog or exhibition guide produced entirely by the organizers, the ninth edition of the Fůd magazine was created for the Biennale Matter of Art. It does not appear in the exhibition as an artwork, yet it is a legitimate part of it, resonating with the biennale’s themes and adding further layers through which it mediates them to visitors. In addition to illustrations, it also contains texts about the biennale for those who wish to gain greater insight into the curatorial group’s approach to contemporary art.

You can buy a Fůd mag in the NGP bookstore. Also available at matterof.art.

At the 2026 Biennale Matter of Art, Adrián Kriška presents his new installation Where Even the Ravens Daren’t Go, which combines queer culture with DIY principles and elements of social activism—all of which are part of his personal life. Kriška and his partner decided to leave Prague and move to an out-of-the- way part of the island of Fuerteventura. There they and some friends bought a dilapidated farmhouse, which they are fixing up on their own to be used as a cultural center with a garden that will one day become a space for artist residencies and related activities. This combination of everyday life and art was inspired by, among other things, the English filmmaker and artist Derek Jarman (1942–1994) and his Prospect Cottage. Jarman repaired an old fishing cottage on Britain’s desolate Dungeness headland, created a sculpture and flower garden around it, and spent the final years of his life there. Life on the periphery, gardening, and subversive DIY activities are also reflected in the various parts of the installation, which symbolizes a utopian microcosm. The upholstered statues of devils are inspired by folk art, their essence viewed from a queer perspective. The devils represent anyone who goes against rigid society, anyone who refuses to obey things that they disagree with. Through these symbols, the installation expresses resistance to the current spread of conservative values in society. The textile works, which combine folk motifs with myth and make use of second-hand materials, are inspired by the textile art of Zorka Ságlová (1942–2003). In Kriška’s installation, the outdoor environment becomes a place for rejecting systemic expectations and building radical dreams.

Gleb Amankulov’s sculptures are temporary structures made from found objects. These objects are locally sourced at the exhibition site, and the works exist only for the length of the specific presentation. The approach responds directly to conditions shared by many artists: the lack of studio and storage space, the precarity of artistic work, and pressure from the art market.

For the 2026 Biennale Matter of Art, Amankulov has assembled sculptures using objects from the storage of the National Gallery Prague, as well as from local thrift stores, flea markets, and online marketplaces. The act of finding and borrowing objects is part of the art itself. It is a performance about how art is bought and sold and what it is for. The objects—old furniture and household items—carry memories, the tastes of a particular class, and the power relations in design. None of the objects are damaged or altered for the purpose of presentation. Once the exhibition ends, the works are taken apart and the objects returned to circulation through resale, donation, or reuse. This flexible method questions whether art objects must be permanent. It challenges our usual ideas about who creates art and the meaning of worth in today’s economy.

Painter Alina Sokolova explores movement and how it connects to society. Her paintings are like a diary of life. Many of them reflect feelings of insecurity and constant change, which come from the tragic reality of ongoing wars. She uses a special visual language with repeated symbols—such as shoes, hand gestures, cigarettes, horses, dogs, and surfaces with a checkered pattern. These symbols appear in surreal, unclear, chaotic relations. This reflects our contemporary world, which feels unstable and full of contradictions, leading to tiredness and the choice to withdraw from society. Sokolova’s paintings capture and preserve the spirit of the current times. Short-lived phenomena from digital social spaces such as TikTok—gestures popular with Gen Z—become part of this visual code. In this way, Sokolova saves these moments for future understanding. The selection for the biennale presents scenes of caregiving and carrying. In them, people (or dogs) switch between being the caregiver and the one being cared for (An Embrace, Dogs Carrying a Soldier). This highlights care as a basic, essential part of life. The word badante is Italian for “caregiver.” Sokolova uses it as the title for a series of paintings about Ukrainian women working in southern Italy as caretakers who live and work in their clients’ homes. Across this series, she studies movements such as lifting and supporting the body in situations of care.

Care System and Support System look at the social side of caregiving. Here a bed turns from a site of intimacy and rest into a boxing ring—a space of vulnerability, insecurity, and feeling exposed.

Željka Aleksić is an artist who works through painting, performance, and object-based installations. She explores how economic realities and societal expectations affect both art and daily life. Her work is based on her own life story. Coming from a working- class migrant background, she uses simple, often understated visual and performative actions to talk about various ideas: who we are, what we consider valuable, or health issues, especially those of people in unstable jobs or in tough situations. Her art exists in a space between feeling exposed and offering criticism, and it makes us think about the struggle of being an artist. It also highlights the strange experience of switching between the role of an “artist” and a “worker.” One of the main ideas in her work is the unfairness in how society is structured. She also examines the tiredness and illness that can come from working. She contrasts this with the pressure to look “beautiful” in the way that society demands.

Part of her diploma project, Das Kapital, is a record of how she survived financially during her five years of study at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (2017–2023). The nod to Karl Marx is deliberate. It connects the book’s core ideas to his theories about work, worth, and social power. The book includes various materials such as photographs taken during her cleaning jobs— images that document how her body changed because of very hard physical labor. It also contains original pay slips, receipts, and official documents from the Austrian social security office. Her university diploma is placed on the last page. The price tag next to the book shows the total income she earned over those five years and puts the book, including the diploma, up for sale. The sum total of €54,312 raises the question: “What is the cost of becoming an artist?”

Some of the original documents contain sensitive information. For this reason, viewers are invited to browse a copy of the original book, which must be viewed in the company of a security guard, or the book must be kept safely behind glass.

Margaret Raspé’s art is very self-reflective and always starts from real life. Her “camera helmet” films from the 1970s and 1980s follow the work of her own hands. A divorced single mother of three, she spent her days cooking, washing, and cleaning—things she did automatically and again and again. In order to study this, she used film and attached a Super 8 camera to a construction helmet to record herself at work. The videos show ordinary domestic tasks like washing dishes, whipping cream, and baking. They look strange because the camera shows everything from a fixed first-person perspective. The films ask questions about how our bodies learn things through habit and about the social rules that have long told women to do this work. Raspé’s home in Berlin, with its garden, was a place for daily chores as well as art and conversations. She also paid attention to the wider environmental contexts hidden within everyday activities. The whipped cream in her kitchen points to industrial animal farming, the food on the table to systems of production and consumption that go far beyond the home.

“I believe wealth will never describe a rich man or poverty a poor man in the eyes of a keen observer.” (excerpt from the text Here I Stand by Shabu Mwangi, 2026)

Shabu Mwangi is a painter, poet, and community leader. In 2003 he cofounded the Wajukuu Art Project, a collective of artists from Nairobi who use art and culture to support young people living in the Mukuru slum. Mukuru is one of the city’s largest informal settlements, and it is currently facing a government-imposed demolition process intended to pave the way for land privatization and so-called urban development. The series of paintings titled Ecology of a Home relates to Mwangi’s long-term interests in the locality. He focuses on the long history of exploitation, which began in colonial times, especially on how land has been used and taken away from people. Because of the current evictions and demolitions—which are often unannounced and illegal—Mwangi asks: What does home really mean? The series documents the time, memories, stories, emotions, and identity of a community confronted with displacement and caught between state control and capitalist exploitation. This body of work shows the local area as a living ecosystem with its own identity and social connections. It reminds us that, despite its challenges, Mukuru—like many endangered places around the world—is home to many people who deserve dignity and the right to decide the neighborhood’s future. Mwangi has developed his artistic style from lived emotional experience, a commitment to amplifying silenced voices, and an urgent need to reject the identities that people in power try to create for others. In his own words, the structure, form, and symbols in his paintings remind us how fragile life becomes when people lose their dignity and political leaders lose their humility.

Huda Takriti was born in Syria and now lives in Vienna. Her work deals with themes like memory, colonial history, archives, and how stories from the past are constructed. She works with video, installation, and collage, often focusing on stories that have been forgotten or silenced—especially those connected to the SWANA region. Her art looks closely at how personal and shared memories are formed, recorded, and sometimes erased, often mixing documentary and imaginative storytelling.

Revisitation (Act One and Act Four) is a series of digital collage prints on fabric and paper, based on the video On Another Note. In the video, Huda’s mother, Souheir Takriti, tells the story of her parents and grandparents, some of whom lived with the status of Palestinian refugees. It begins with Huda’s grandmother, Hikmat al-Habbal, who was also an artist. She left several embroidered textile works unfinished on purpose. Even though Huda’s mother knows how to finish them, they are left incomplete—acting as a starting point for retelling the family’s history. This opens up space for different perspectives and challenges common historical narratives about displacement and erasure that continue to this day.

Instead of finishing the embroidery, Huda Takriti found her own artistic way to continue this family practice across generations. In Revisitation, she scans one of the original unfinished textiles as if the scanner were a sewing machine. She then creates collages by layering it with family photos, stretching and manipulating time by printing it on fabric over four meters long. While the original textile stays unfinished—reflecting the ongoing destruction caused by the Nakba—Takriti keeps activating the history that needs to be told and remembered.

Ladislava Gažiová has long worked with spray paint and stencils on ungessoed canvas (meaning without the use of gesso—a white primer). In her work she poetically depicts everyday objects and events. At the same time, however, her paintings are melancholy and hide a sense of unease. In fact, it is through this unease that she indirectly relates to current events in society. In her work for the 2026 Biennale Matter of Art, she nevertheless turns to more timeless themes with a new installation consisting of nine paintings inspired by concepts of time and existence as a circle, in relation to the solar cycle of day and night and the associated icons. The works are also inspired by woven carpets with geometric patterns. This geometry recalls patience and order but also the all-pervading nature of living existence, which can be understood spiritually as well. This relates mainly to the motif of ears of wheat, which symbolically connects the cosmic with the everyday. It brings to mind humility and the acceptance of the inevitable. The installation’s spatial arrangement reflects this circular geometry as well.

Rufina Bazlova started a long-term social project with art historian Sofia Tocar after Belarus’s 2020 post- election protests and the violent repression that followed. The project draws attention to human rights violations. Bazlova collaborates with people and communities in embroidering the stories of political prisoners. This is in order to highlight people and events that the Belarusian government wants to erase from history.

Participants stitch and send the pieces back, often with personal comments. The visual language she has developed, called “vyzhyvanka,” combines the Belarusian words for “to stitch” and “to survive.” It uses traditional Belarusian ornamentation and the white-red color combination now associated with the political opposition.

Distributed activism connects different people and groups into a transnational network of protest and solidarity. The project treats craft as an important cultural practice and also as a way to share knowledge and encourage independence. It addresses the question of how political engagement can be supported and shared visually. Since 2021 more than eight hundred people from forty-one countries have joined. The project is about stitching, but it is also creating something bigger: Many participants have reported that it has made the political situation feel personal and increased their civic involvement.

This project is supported by the ArtPower Belarus program and funded by the European Union.

With Ribbons and Flags is the last project of Ukrainian artist and anarchist Davyd Chychkan. He completed it before he volunteered to defend Ukraine from Russian aggression. He was killed at the front line on August 10, 2025. The graphic series depicts collective portraits of anarchists and antiauthoritarian leftists who are fighting for or have died defending Ukraine. It combines soldiers from different units into one image to show the unity of leftist gatherings and public life in Ukraine before the full-scale invasion. Chychkan was a key figure in Ukrainian antifascist and anarchist movements. He often celebrated marginalized figures and little-known histories of resistance. His exhibitions were frequently attacked by far-right groups. The series also looks back at history. It references the Ukrainian People’s Republic and the Huliaipole Republic, the world’s first anarchist state, which existed between 1918 and 1921 in the Zaporizhzhia region. Nestor Makhno, who started the movement, appears in several portraits as an icon of resistance to Russian imperialism. Chychkan died in the same region that was the center of the struggle of Ukrainian anarchists a century ago. He was fighting for an independent Ukraine, which he described as “socialist and antiauthoritarian in its design.”

Jiří Žák works primarily with the moving image and participatory theater. He uses fiction and stories to explore history. His works mix fact and fiction in a poetic, nonlinear way. This approach allows viewers to connect with history personally and emotionally, which can challenge traditional views and open it up for critical rethinking.

The presented video and collages are part of Žák’s long-term artistic research into the history of the Czechoslovak arms trade and its role in the country’s international relations with countries of the Global South. Žák started this research in 2015 in response to the war in Syria and the resulting migration. For over a decade, he has questioned the Czech Republic’s (and formerly Czechoslovakia’s) role as a major arms producer, challenging the idea of Czech society as pacifist and nonviolent. Unfinished Love Letter revisits the Cold War era. It uses clips from propaganda films from the 1960s–1980s that celebrated Czechoslovakia for building factories in Syria. A voice-over speaks to the viewer like a confession about an unhealthy romantic relationship. It talks about power, care, and sincere feelings while hinting at the secret, large-scale arms exports taking place at the time. The phrase “let us have the same dream tonight” echoes the old idea of international socialist solidarity that once helped justify these exports. The idea lost meaning decades later when the Czech Republic broke EU law by refusing to accept (mostly Syrian) refugees.

Bačynsjkyj’s sculpture is influenced by his life as a nomad following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. He uses clothing and everyday materials that are easy to find, giving visual and material form to experiences that are both personal and shared. He turns fragments of personal clothing, found fabrics, old furs, feathers, broken toys, and beads into forms that look like folk collections, everyday objects, religious images, and bodies that do not fit into “normal” categories. By collecting, layering, stitching, and recombining, the works reveal lived experience and remind us how people used to sew when materials were scarce.

The artist also writes short texts that share his thoughts as a queer Ukrainian artist living amidst war and migration. The works are playful but also a little threatening. They use what is available at hand to represent the precarious reality people face. The artist calls himself a “mutant,” and his art remains in contradictions, limits, and ideas about identity, place, and style that cannot be fixed.

Nadia Markiewicz is a distinctive member of the youngest generation of Polish artists. She works mainly with performance, video, object art, and installations. Her work is based on an artistic study of the history of bodies that do not conform to ideas of “healthy” or “normal” physicality. Bodies with “handicaps” have often been pushed to the margins of society or put on display as bizarre curiosities in circuses and at funfairs.

Even so, the artist uses her work to place her own physical “otherness” on display, exploring it and tearing down the boundaries of what we consider normal and beautiful. Her monumental work Mutants includes photographs of flowers with random genetic mutations. In the world of horticulture, these flowers are the subject of admiration, and horticulturists cross-breed them in order to preserve their uniqueness and further reproduce them. Here rare mutations are considered something beautiful. In her sculptures, Markiewicz also works with illuminated light bulbs and references to the aesthetics of circuses and funfairs. Through these works, she forces us to think about what we consider attractive and why.

kroužek intersekce [krɔːʒek ɪntɜːrsektse] is a community that creates independent spaces for collective learning. It organizes public gatherings where participants discuss contemporary feminist literature and experiment with forms of learning without a teacher. For the biennale, kroužek intersekce has created a multilayered work consisting of nine collective readings—gatherings in the exhibition space. The word “kroužek” (circle, club) points to the effort to remove theory from an inaccessible academic environment and also to the importance of childishness and play, while “intersekce” (intersection) signifies the intertwining of various forms of social inequality, which are identified during the gatherings. The group also discusses ways to collectively disrupt these inequalities, addressing revolutionary ideas, free association, the development of skills that facilitate collaboration, and the disruption of hierarchies within the collective. In the work The Tent, it focuses on the collective administration of the space, sharing the infrastructure with groups that lack their own space. kroužek intersekce has established the rules for sharing, and it is testing the principles of collective responsibility. In doing so, it is shifting the institutional environment toward greater openness to the voices and needs of those who fall outside the scope of curatorial selection and accepted notions of what art is. The Tent can be reserved via a booking form and used according to the established rules. The curatorial team’s aim is to use this project to explore visions of what an art biennale can be. In addition to the exhibition and accompanying program, it can also become a space for collaborative work, gathering, organizing, and a sort of laboratory for the collective management of public property.

Zaher Jureidini and Leila Basma are filmmakers from Lebanon. They currently live and work in both Prague and Beirut. Both studied at FAMU in Prague and have been collaborating for years now; they have shown their films at major festivals like Venice, Karlovy Vary, and Busan. Jureidini is a cinematographer but also works as a curator and researcher. He is interested in the ways in which films and videos can influence how we understand history and politics. Basma is a film director and photographer, and she teaches screenwriting and directing at FAMU. She also started a project called Arab Girls in Film, which supports Arab women, trans, and non-binary filmmakers in South-West Asia, North Africa, and around the world.

For the 2026 Biennale Matter of Art, Basma and Jureidini made a series of video portraits. They filmed people from the SWANA community (South West Asia and North Africa) who live in Prague. Their work uses three videos shown side by side. These videos mix personal portraits, home videos, and thoughts about what “home” means when you live far away and when memories are in danger of being lost.

The videos create a conversation about distance and belonging. They show how living away from your homeland can change your sense of identity and how new forms of community and support can grow in Europe—a place where migration and belonging are often debated topics. Here, For Now is both a personal look at lives caught between places and a kind of urgent archive. It tries to preserve stories and identities that might otherwise be forgotten.

Sensory Shelter is a collaboration between painter Bronislava Orlická and textile designer Zuzana Smrkovská. They have been working together since 2017. In their past work, they used a Brother KH 950 knitting machine from the 1990s connected to an Arduino microcontroller and the open-source software AYAB. They used it to knit poetic texts into soft, see- through fabrics. Sensory Shelter is their second freestanding object. It combines Orlická’s painting and drawing style with Smrkovská’s technical skill in programming. The idea came from Orlická’s long-term interest in how painting can create bodily feelings for the viewer. Painting can help calm the senses when we feel overwhelmed. Loud noise, bright light, and crowded spaces can cause stress, tiredness, trouble sleeping, and other health problems whether we are aware of it or not. Most of us face these overwhelming stimuli every day, often without even realizing it.

Sensory Shelter moves beyond the solely visual experience. It gives the same importance to the sense of touch, offering a bodily experience that allows the mind and body to relax and reset. Visitors are invited to turn off their phones and immerse themselves in a soft, quiet environment, enjoy calming colors, restore their energy, and take a quiet moment protected from the outside world. Its spiral shape, like a snail’s shell, suggests a slower lifestyle. This way of living focuses on caring for personal health and the environment, moving away from overwork and “hustle culture” (the pressure to always be busy)—common problems in the late capitalist system.

Bronislava Orlická graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, where she studied in the painting studio of Jiří Sopko. Her artistic practice primarily focuses on painting and drawing, characterized by minimalism, imaginative gestures, and soft transitions of color. Since 2013 she has been also developing her own unique visual language in tattooing and has collaborated on projects that combine poetry, visual art, and knitting. The paintings selected for the 2026 edition of the Biennale Matter of Art showcase her long-term interests. They explore the emotional properties of color (Viscera, Yellow Membrane) and our inner self-protection mechanisms (Protective Shell). Orlická is fascinated by vulnerability and how art makes a viewer feel inside their body. This comes from today’s reality, in which, despite vast economic, technological, and medical resources and innovations, many people are suffering from stress-related illnesses. Right now, millions die too young from diseases that are preventable or from problems we already have the tools to fix. Orlická’s recent art fights against the speed of modern life and the pressure to be useful, productive, and successful. It invites us to find a quiet, forgotten space inside ourselves. The space lets us value ideas that aren’t “useful” and recognize our need to relax, do nothing, and enjoy what she calls “the luxury of boredom”—the sense of having enough time.

Shella Radio is an independent, community-driven platform whose goal is to support and connect artists and cultural projects from Prague with the rest of the world. The word “shella” comes from Egyptian Arabic slang and means “a group of friends who do things together.” Founded in 2024, Shella works both online and in a physical space. It provides a platform to new artists and explores the widest possible idea of what radio can be. Shella’s activities include political talk shows, panel discussions, experimental video art, in-person listening sessions, club nights, and summer markets where local artists, jewelers, and tattoo artists can present their work. Electronic music is at the heart of what they do. Based in Ankali, a famous club in Prague, Shella grows together with its community— both as artists and as people. It brings together people from different backgrounds and with different skills. Shella connects talented artists from Prague with each other and with international audiences. It also invites well-known artists from abroad to broadcast together with local creators. Shella builds real connections and encourages exchange. It takes the club experience beyond its walls, recording talks and interviews and archiving both the music and the conversations that make club culture a meaningful—and sometimes political—space. As part of the Biennale Matter of Art, Shella is organizing live events and bringing its listening station into the exhibition space. But above all, Shella’s work is about relationships. It cannot be boxed in— it lives and grows where it belongs: in the club.

Aliza Orlan creates drawings and works with textiles, object art, performances, and text. Her art also explores her identity, body, and sexuality. She criticizes political strategies that suppress queer identity. Her drawings are the result of many months of patient work. In both their form and spiritual depth, they relate to the work of the American visionary artist Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986). In Orlan’s symbolic works, atypical bodies become one with floral and animal motifs, creating a living landscape that can at times feel erotic.

Orlan grew up in a Protestant environment, which is one reason why she explores religious and spiritual traditions from a queer perspective. In her new work for the 2026 Biennale Matter of Art, she found inspiration in the ancient religious cult of Cybele and its third-gender priests known as Galli, whom Orlan combines with her own experience of transitioning. The objects made out of empty hormone packages criticize the purely medical view of trans bodies. The installation reflects the rich yet little-known history of queer spirituality and past figures who went against traditional gender roles, who are tied to the present through the artist’s personal experience. It is a daring body of work that nevertheless changes us primarily through its beauty and sensitivity.

At the 2026 Biennale Matter of Art, Hana Garová presents her comprehensive series of drawings titled Identity – Collection of Records, which she made over a period of roughly two years after graduating from Prague’s Academy of Fine Arts. At the time, Garová was intensively searching for her artistic path and identity. Like all graduates, she had to leave school, but she also decided to deliberately isolate herself in her studio and refused to participate in exhibitions.

It was during this time that Hana Garová found her identity: Through obsessive journal drawing and painting, she explored her personality and found her own distinctive painterly vocabulary. In her artistic practice, personal feelings and visual style cannot be separated. When she was working on the exhibited works, she always began by looking at her own face or exploring her thoughts. In this dynamic process, the form of her self became more figurative, or also more abstract. She depicts various emotions such as sadness, anger, and alienation but also ecstatic joy. The emotions in her drawings cannot be expressed in words. They are too intense. They are mixed in a melting pot and defy categorization.

In relation to the subjects of her drawings, she speaks of dysphoria, the search for gender identity, unrequited desire, and mental imbalance. Working on these difficulties helped her to understand, address, and overcome them. Her works thus strongly reflect the artistic process as a lived necessity, one which is further amplified by the fact that they were made not to be exhibited but mainly for personal reasons.

The Last Basilica is a work by Georgian artist, curator, art historian, and researcher David Apakidze, made for the 2026 Biennale Matter of Art. Apakidze looks at Georgian Orthodox images from a queer perspective to find hidden meanings, especially at a time when non-heterosexual people are facing violence and exclusion from shared symbols, identity, and beliefs. The installation reimagines Georgia’s first basilica, Bolnisi Sioni, built in the fifth century. It is the oldest surviving church in the country, known for its early Georgian inscriptions and the Bolnisi Cross, a very important symbol. By presenting it as the “last church” at the end of times, Apakidze questions whether religious power should stay the same and asks how religious traditions, symbols, and spaces might be reimagined by new spiritual identities and communities today.

The sculptural installation references the historic architecture but replaces stone with felt. This softer material weakens the strong, manly look of church buildings. It adds a hands-on, handmade feel of a craft done traditionally by women. The stained glass windows mix the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse with pop culture images and change the traditional function of sacred architecture. Instead of only bringing light inside, they send light outward, shining beyond the walls.

Jan Durina is an artist who first gained recognition for his photographic work. In recent years, however, he has focused more on performances, textile work, and drawing. In this exhibition he is showing older works, which are being exhibited together for the first time. These works reflect themes typical for his art: in particular, his view of his own queer identity as someone whose masculinity upsets traditional norms and social expectations. Durina’s work closely relates to his personal life and his thoughts, emotions, and experiences. He “enters” his artistic practice like entering a shelter—one in which he provides refuge for us as well. We, too, can share his vulnerability and the complexity of his emotions. In the selected photographs, Durina shows a masculinity that rejects the patriarchal myth of a man who is the master of the world, who exploits everything. Instead, it presents itself as a necessary part of the shared mutuality of fragile and imperfect relationships.

The exhibited textile works were worn by the artist during his performances. Made through meticulous hand-crafted work, they resemble sewn drawings. In fact, fashion and clothing play an important role in Durina’s art. In his old music project For You Katrina he played a character who wore a strange mask and costume inspired by club culture. Veiled in this mask and costume, we can feel various contradictory feelings and urges, including some that we have never experienced before.

Tina Bxtq is a Slovak multimedia artist who lives in Prague. Working primarily with sculpture and performance, she explores the meaning of monstrosity. According to queer theory, the word “monstrous” is used to describe bodies that deviate from social expectations—bodies that are or want to be different. The video installation (a recording of a performance) reflects the anxieties and fantasies associated with becoming a monster. The angel’s body is not a cohesive entity; it is a permeable and fluid interface. The surface and the interior cannot be distinguished from one another. The other characters with bound hands who are devouring the angel are symbols of toxic interpersonal relationships. They remind us of our desire to constantly violate boundaries and to exploit nature and ourselves.

In a close dialogue with the exhibited works by German photographer Jürgen Baldiga (1959–1993), we also present the series Warmth That Only Fire Can Give – A Portrait Series by his friend Aron Neubert, who photographed Baldiga in the final years of his life. In fact, Baldiga asked him personally to document his struggle with AIDS. Though it consists of stylized portraits, the series nevertheless offers an intimate look at Baldiga’s personal, everyday life. The photographs show how art remained important for Baldiga until the very last moment. Through art, he could bear witness to the gradual transformation of his sick body and thus document the crisis associated with HIV and its consequences. At the time, there was little information about the disease. It was a social taboo, and those with the illness were judged by majority society. Baldiga was one of the first artists in Germany to publicly speak about AIDS. In one photograph, we see him at a protest of the German branch of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, an organization founded in New York in 1987 that used direct actions to fight prejudices against AIDS and to protest the lack of action by the American government), another shows him vomiting, and in yet another he is leaning against his own grave. All these fragmentary images are combined into one comprehensive whole in which the personal intertwines with the politics of visibility, acceptance, and pride.

Cezary Poniatowski’s black polystyrene reliefs look like they are from a future archaeological dig. The shapes are compact and shield-like, like pieces of old buildings, but they also look like small shrines or mysterious symbols. His sculpture explores the tension between exterior and interior and how this relates to life in Eastern Europe under capitalism after 1989. His works are made by pressing, reusing, and bending materials. Everyday objects become vessels of memory from many generations. They sometimes look strange or act oddly. The choice of polystyrene is important. After 1989 this material became common in Poland and Eastern Europe for quick renovations of old buildings built during the Soviet era. It is cheap, fast, and effective, much like the rapid economic changes of the 1990s and 2000s. Some people gained a lot from this change, while others lost. Polystyrene as a material also has a long history. It is made from crude oil, which comes from ancient plant, animal, and mineral remains. This material connects deep (geological) time with a practice that covers the traces of an unwanted past.

Jürgen Baldiga was born in 1959 in Essen, West Germany, and moved to Berlin in 1979, where he moved in queer and artist circles. He wrote poetry, performed, and worked as a cook and sex worker. After being diagnosed with HIV in 1984, he focused on documentary photography. His images present an original view of West German society in the 1980s, including portraits of ordinary people on the street and the life of marginal communities and subcultures, recorded from his position as an insider.

The selected photographs represent just a small fragment of his diverse output. Today the archive of his work is held by Berlin’s Schwules Museum (schwul means “gay” in German). The exhibited selection shows Baldiga’s view of himself and of the community of which he was a part. For him, the self-portrait was a way of inventing and shaping gay identity. Self-portraits appear throughout his career, from the beginning to the end. His struggle with illness is also the subject of his very last self-portrait: Wearing a clown nose, he gazes off into the distance. Despite the fact that it was taken in the final stage of his illness, the photograph reveals not just exhaustion but also acceptance. It is a picture of physical reality, something that Baldiga faithfully depicted until the very end. It is also the photograph he chose for his obituary.

Jürgen Baldiga was one of the first contemporary artists in Germany to talk publicly about AIDS. He used his art to depict its impact on the body and the community. At the time, there was little information about the illness, which was considered a social taboo. Baldiga nevertheless stands proudly before the camera, as if to say: I am here and now, and I live. Besides his self- portrait, the exhibition also includes portraits of drag queens he knew, who called themselves die Tunten in German and who performed at Berlin’s famous queer club SchwuZ, which unfortunately had to close recently.

We would like to thank Aron Neubert for the openness and trust he showed in lending us the works.

Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven sees art as an exploration of the unknown. Her art is inspired by counterculture, feminist theory, and critical thinking about technology, and her practice is at once analytical and intuitive. She examines how gender and knowledge appear in visual culture, drawing on pop culture, mysticism, and the unconscious. She has been a pioneer of computer and media art since the 1970s. She has collaborated with scientists, including researchers at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in Brussels, and she cofounded the noise band Club Moral with Danny Devos.

Her art often groups and juxtaposes images and texts. She gets visual materials from magazines, mass media, soft-core pornography, and comics. She often makes use of commercial graphics techniques such as plexiglass, computers, and professional printing. The plexiglass holders here contain painted, partly transparent plates inspired in part by the philosophy of René Descartes. They are arranged without a fixed order, creating open structures in which all of the elements belong to a single work that never reaches a final state. Terezín is a computer animation that reuses soft-core pornographic images of women alongside photographs the artist took in the Czech Republic, including at the former concentration camp of Theresienstadt. The soundtrack mixes three recordings of the second voice of a cantata by Johann Sebastian Bach into a dense, multilayered sound.

The video Angel Artur Snitkus by France-based Ukrainian artist AntiGonna is a portrait of the queer artist Artur Snitkus, who was killed in 2024 while defending his country against Russian aggression as a member of the Ukrainian army. It is a lyrical and delicate portrait that depicts the artist as an angel. The power of the film is amplified by the real fate of its protagonist, revealing the ability of art to preserve something that, in life, is fleeting. The piece was made as a necessity, as a silent witness of hope and resistance in the face of injustice.

“The Angel that he embodied has returned from the otherworld—not as a character but as a specter of death and mourning, warning of an inescapable fate not only for himself but for all Ukrainians. What once seemed like an experiment has become a prophecy. Artur was exceptional: He lived courageously in his own androgyny, ahead of his time, shifting the currents of contemporary art. When I learned of his death, the pain struck like a knife in the back. Later, a vision came: Artur rising to the heavens—radiant and majestic. He taught me connection and love. He did not want war, but fate showed no mercy. Now he is where he always was in life—an Angel. I will remember him forever. And I will never forgive.” (AntiGonna)

This artist based in the Netherlands creates multi- layered art full of cultural references. In fact, the very choice of pseudonym, the Publik Universal Frxnd, is a reference to the American Quaker preacher known as the Public Universal Friend (1752–1819).

Born Jemima Wilkinson, in 1776 the Public Universal Friend underwent a serious illness that involved a deep spiritual experience. Thus was born the Friend, who took on an identity that was neither male nor female. The Friend no longer wanted to be addressed by the Friend’s birth name and spent the subsequent forty years preaching about social justice and salvation, which was open to anyone. The artist known as the Publik Universal Frxnd grew up in a British family of Quakers. The choice of pseudonym thus embraces the artist’s roots, although it is also a queer game associated with unbecoming a clear identity. The exhibited constructions look like fitness equipment. They are references to the relationship between the body and machines throughout history. The video is inspired by a traditional British folk dance in which the rhythmic dance steps imitate the rhythm of mechanical looms—a symbol of the industrial revolution and how automation replaces human labor with machines. According to the sociologist Max Weber, the era saw the beneficial combination of the Protestant work ethic (discipline and self-denial) and capitalism. This combination continued to evolve and is today reflected in our inner need to constantly increase our productivity—not just in our work but in all areas of life.

In these artworks, the Public Universal Frxnd also explores the club scene and queer BDSM practices. Subjugating oneself (to the rhythm of music or to another person) is presented as a satisfying escape from reality. The sculptures Idleness and Industry and the other works on display represent the complicated and convoluted relationship between control and submission, between the demands of “the system” and our own desires.

Noor Abed works between performance and film. Her art explores social choreography and how groups form, mixing staged and documentary styles. Abed is known for using analogue film techniques and drawing on ancient rituals, myths, and folk culture from Palestine as tools for collective freedom and resistance. Her research looks at in-between spaces, where past and present meet and exist side by side as real, lived experience. Her cinematic language has a unique way of affecting our perception of time. She uses time to connect imagination and emotion.

Abed’s works bring out the hidden political power in what is unseen—things that may be unconscious but that you can feel in ancient Palestinian sites like wells, valleys, mountains, and places of worship.

The film we walk in our sleep acts like a doorway to a space where the living and the dead meet, share thoughts, and wander in a realm that is often invisible. The film creates a new way of imagining space, as a necessary response to how history can sometimes feel closed off. It moves between the sacred and the modern, letting both exist together in the same time and place, rooted in Palestine. The filming involved local communities in Palestinian villages. It captures everyday scenes that sometimes expand into geometric shapes through choreography inspired by sacred movements from ancient cultures. These group formations build up over time, linking the movement of bodies to places of mourning, centuries-old buildings, and the traces left behind in Palestine’s urban and social landscape.

The work was created in coproduction with the Biennale Matter of Art and the BredaPhoto Festival. Its production was also supported by the Han Nefkens Foundation and the Mondriaan Fund.

The Taring Padi collective emerged as the Institute of People Oriented Culture in Indonesia in 1998. It was founded by art students and activists during a time of major political change in the country. Their art is always connected to social, cultural, and political action, using tools like street protests, banners, woodcut prints, and music to educate people and build community. For the 2026 Biennale Matter of Art, Taring Padi is showing a special artwork: a linocut print produced with the American artist Roger Peet in their studio in Yogyakarta. It marks sixty years since the 1965–66 mass killings in Indonesia.

In 1965, after a failed coup attempt, Indonesia’s military—with help and lists of names from the United States—began targeting left-wing political groups. Over the next few years, nearly two million people were killed and hundreds of thousands were imprisoned without trial. This period is known as the Indonesian genocide.

Their print and project, called 6065, asks a powerful question: “What happens to the future when the fascists win?” It also imagines a world where justice is finally achieved. This history is an important lesson for everyone about how far powerful groups will go to stop movements that fight for a better world.

This installation of Wayang Kardus (which in Indonesian means “cardboard puppets”) comes from a workshop Taring Padi led in Prague in May 2026. The workshop’s theme, “Stop the violence against humanity,” is directly connected to the message of the 6065 print: We must learn from history to prevent such crimes from happening again.

The life-size puppets are made from recycled cardboard. They are a key part of Taring Padi’s work to support people fighting for social justice. For almost thirty years, the group has helped communities in Indonesia and other countries by making banners, posters, music, and murals for protests and campaigns. These cardboard puppets have many uses. They make protest crowds look larger, provide shade from the sun, or offer some protection from police during demonstrations.

In the workshop, Taring Padi doesn’t just teach people how to make the puppets. They also lead discussions about the workshop’s theme. Together, participants create a story and a political message for their puppet characters.

The puppets in this exhibition were made to support activist groups in the Czech Republic. After the exhibition, they will return to the people who created them.

The short atmospheric film The Ovary by Portuguese artist Isadora Neves Marques (previously Pedro Neves Marques) explores the subject of male pregnancy. Thanks to subtle hints in the film’s story, we learn that a gay couple has become pregnant after one of the men has had a female ovary implanted in him. Drawing on the fan-fiction genre known as mpreg (from “male pregnancy”), Neves Marques explores the utopian idea that, thanks to medical progress, the reproductive work usually done by women (pregnancy, birth, nursing, etc.) might be more fairly divided between both sexes. The Ovary is a soothing meditation on a better world that might be possible if we are more open to unusual changes. The film’s subversive intimacy is further enhanced by the use of a cover version of Lana Del Rey’s “Let Me Love You Like a Woman.”

Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven approaches art as an explo- ration of the unknown. She comes from counterculture, feminist theory, and critical views of technology. Her practice is at once analytical and intuitive. She has been a pioneer of computer and media art since the 1970s. She has collaborated with scientists at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in Brussels, and she cofounded the noise band Club Moral with Danny Devos.

Her works are constellations of images and text that connect different sources and kinds of knowledge: pop culture, mysticism, soft-core pornography, comics, and scientific and philosophical literature. Van Kerckhoven loves collecting and has been accumulating magazines for decades. She uses their images in collages and series. These works look at how gender and knowledge are visually represented.

The series About representations, true or false is inspired by George Boole’s An Investigation of the Laws of Thought (1854). Boole was the mathematician who invented Boolean algebra, the system of true and false that became the basis of modern computing and artificial intelligence. Each of the four works in the series shows one theory from logic. They put Boole’s abstract structures in dialogue with Van Kerckhoven’s collected images. In doing so, she reflects on science’s constant search for proof of things that researchers are convinced exist. She sees a parallel to her own work: By making art, she produces material evidence for things she feels or senses but cannot yet know.

Liliana Zeic is drawn to places and people on the edge of what is “normal,” both in human culture and in nature. Her wooden panels bring together motifs of plants, queer bodies, communities, and rituals. She uses intarsia, a complicated inlay technique traditionally used for decorating furniture and floors. She chose this medium because of her own experience: a rural childhood and her parents’ carpentry workshop in 1990s Poland. Zeic works exclusively with burl wood, which comes from trees that were sick and then healed. In her work, the irregular patterns of burl wood are no longer just decoration; they become a way to show nonnormative worlds and to blur ideas about what is considered healthy and natural, pathological or unnatural.

The series Benefits of BDSM for Trauma Survivors looks at how consensual play of dominance and submission can help healing. It asks how ideas about intimate life that are often taboo might support healing, care, and greater sensitivity. At the meeting point of human and nonhuman bodies, queer communities canbecome allies of the plant world. Zeic imagines the space where human and nonhuman outsiders meet as a space for renewal and future possibilities. In this space different ways of living become possible, and the right to exist outside of dominant structures is not an exception but a central idea.

Margaret Raspé’s early works focused on her own home and daily life in front of the camera. Later, her art moved to a bigger scale, looking at the planet and the universe. She dealt with ecology, sustainability, spirituality, and theories of perception. What connects all of her works is the search for other forms of knowledge and the idea that our everyday environment affects the bodies, beings, and objects that surround us.

Kontinuum II consists of an island of blue broken glass with six woolen balls. Raspé likened them to stars or planets. The sound of her singing is emitted from them, layered over recordings of the rotation of Earth, the Sun, the Moon, Jupiter, Venus, and Mars, adjusted to the range of human hearing.

Throughout her five-decade career, Raspé asked questions about her own existence and that of the world around her. She created installations, performances, photographs, paintings, and drawings to help the viewer feel an awareness of where everyday life and the cosmos come together. She tried to make perception, spirituality, and politics part of one understanding. Her work also includes a critique of civilization that comes from directly engaging with nature. This approach extended to her own garden in Berlin, where she often brought together artists and thinkers.

Ștefan Bertalan was one of the most significant figures of the Romanian neo-avant-garde. His art focuses on research and process, with nature as its central theme. In 1965 he cofounded Groupe 111 with Roman Cotoșman and Constantin Flondor. This is considered to be the first experimental art collective in communist Romania. Later he was part of the interdisciplinary group Sigma (1969–1980). He studied natural forms with methodical, almost scientific curiosity, examining their structures, patterns, and basic logic. His work forms a mysterious microcosm where curiosity, philosophy, mathematics, cybernetics, and spirituality converge. His interest in natural processes led him to a cosmology in which man and nature are inseparable.

The exhibited photographs document the development of a bean plant from a seed to a grown plant. They were made for the work Kinogram of the Natural Process Seen through the Lens, shown at the concept-exhibition Study in Timișoara in 1978. To Bertalan, the development of seeds was a metaphor for human existence. In his later, expressionist drawings, biological observation gives way to dreamlike, deeply personal visions of humans and plants living together, resulting in strange hybrid forms.

Fedir Tetyanych was a visionary artist who worked across painting, sculpture, and performance. He was influenced by cosmism, cybernetics, rural Ukrainian traditions, and ecology. Born in Kniazhychi near Kyiv, he explored the unity of humans and the universe, using ideas from science fiction and scientific research as well as Ukrainian folk traditions, cosmologies, and history, focusing on the Cossacks. He was commissioned to create works on monumental mosaics and decorative panels, while he engaged in his own theoretical and permeative practice in his free time.

One of his central concepts was the Biotechnosphere. This was a universal, self-sufficient module shaped like a sphere with a radius of 120 centimeters. He imagined it as a space for living, shelter, transport, and rescue. When connected with other modules, the Biotechnosphere would grow into larger structures. Tetyanych wanted a sustainable model of coexistence, not domination by technology. His view of the cosmos was distinctly humanist. Unlike Russian cosmism, which wanted to change the earth for future humanity at any cost, he rejected the destruction of existing life. He described his existence as an ongoing performance stretched from the earth to infinity, in which he presented actions and wrote cosmist and ecological manifestos. His avant-garde work is a local response to broader ideas about science and technology and their hopeful possibilities. It reflects the environmental awareness and futurological imagination that emerged during the global Cold War.

Nosrat Karimi was one of the most significant pioneers of Iranian animation, puppet film, and cinema. He made the first stop-motion film and the first puppet film in Iran and founded the country’s first animation studio. After early training in Tehran, Karimi traveled to Europe in 1953. He worked as an assistant director to Vittorio De Sica in Rome before studying under Karel Zeman at FAMU in Prague, where he specialized in animated and puppet film. FAMU trained many of the key figures in West Asian cinema, and Karimi was among them. He returned to Iran in 1964. His graduation work,

Life Insurance (1957), was one of the first animated films made by an Iranian. It is a stop-motion puppet animation about a short-sighted hunter in the jungle who ends up fleeing from a lion. Life, presented here, was made after his return to his homeland. It is rhythmic and playful, showing plants through their life cycle and struggle for survival. The film brings together Karimi’s European training and the visual language of Persian miniature painting.

Běla Kolářová was a unique figure of the Czech postwar avant-garde. She explored the order and poetics of the ordinary and the overlooked. Kolářová was self-taught and came to art through photography in her thirties. This happened after she fell ill with tuberculosis and had to leave her job at a publishing house in Prague, where she had worked for fifteen years.

A turning point came in 1961, when she read a claim that the entire world had already been photographed. She turned her attention to the small, functional objects that photography had mostly ignored. Soon she began creating art entirely without a camera. She arranged bits of paper, thread, hair, and organic matter directly on light-sensitive paper and exposed the paper to light in a darkroom. From 1964 onward she started making assemblages. She applied everyday objects onto canvas: snap fasteners, matches, razor blades, paper clips, locks of hair. Her compositions are playful in their elements yet precise and logical. They also reflect a broader postwar interest in pattern and communication systems, important in fields like cybernetics and the social sciences of the time.

Cezary Bodzianowski has been using tea bags as a sculptural material since the early 1990s. This practice developed alongside his performances. He takes these fragile, stained objects—things which most people toss aside without a second thought—and turns them into carefully made poetic pieces. Most of his work is performance. He stages small odd scenes and short absurd stories, describing his approach as a “personal theater of events.”

His actions in public and private spaces celebrate moments when nothing is produced or achieved. He resists the pressure to always be useful. Once a tea has given its flavor and color to the water, the bag is drained and discarded. For the artist, the tea bag is a metaphor for the exhaustion in precarious creative work. But when these used bags are put together in compositions, they refuse to be thrown away. They become a record of time spent not working, a moment of rest, the pause that daily life both demands and denies.

Alex Sihelsk* is a multidisciplinary artist who explores queer concepts of witchcraft, mythology, and ecology. They are also interested in agriculture and animal herding. In the exhibition, they are presenting a new film about an alternate future. This vision of the future is based on ideas about a society run on solar energy, where different animal species understand one another and people see the world as an interconnected whole.

In the film, we follow the character of a queer herdswoman who wanders the summer landscapewith her flock. She avoids the isolated dwellings scattered across the countryside. As a visionary, she brings worlds together. She has to come to terms with her own inner shadows and demons in order to turn them into a holistic spiritual vision through which she then understands how to use energy resources in a sustainable manner. The film’s dialogue is in Interslavic, an unofficial language invented by a group of linguists, thanks to which it can be understood by anyone who speaks a Slavic language.

The production of the video was supported by the Fund for the Support of Art (FPU).

In the Garden is a project by the Prague-based art collective StonyTellers. They work with ceramics, gardening, and relational, community-based art. They also take a critical view of the way the art world functions. This vegetable garden was built as a continuation of their previous gardening work in Prague. It was created during a four-day workshop with the Viennese architecture studio dreiSt. and local volunteers, students, artists, and cultural workers. It uses locally sourced leftover materials, demonstrating ecological ideas of recycling and local resourcefulness. The garden is situated in the yard of a historical mental health sanatorium currently operating as the cultural center Tusculum, run by the Petrohradská kolektiv. As a long-term contribution to the site, the garden offers a space for different people, animals, and plants to recover energy, share time, enjoy nature, and explore different ways of living together and caring for each other. The project aims to enrich an existing meeting point for visitors, employees, and patients of the nearby hospital as well as resident artists and cultural workers.

In keeping with the biennale’s theme, the project aims to last longer than the exhibition. It highlights artistic practices which are not objects, which can’t be bought and sold, valuing slow processes and applying feminist principles in the process. By not making typical “art objects,” StonyTellers blur the line between art and life. They look for more accessible, caring ways of working and a meaningful critique that exposes the hidden systems and networks that support cultural production.

The project was realized in collaboration with the Prague 6 Long-Term Care Hospital, LINA Platform, Via Foundation, studio dreiSt., and VI PER Gallery.