Kristyna a Marek Milde: Call of the Forest
25/4 2025—31/8 2025
Gallery 3
Curators: Theo Carnegy-Tan, Kristyna and Marek Milde
Across their career, Kristyna and Marek Milde have used the language of the everyday to explore the relationship that people have to the environment. Following many exhibitions in the USA, where they made their home in 2003, this is their first institutional exhibition in Prague, showcasing new, ongoing, and previous works that playfully interrogate the dichotomies of nature and culture that inform our conceptions of the natural world.
The exhibition includes two major new works made specifically for Kunsthalle Praha. Arbomobile (2024), a New York taxi filled with living trees, and Call of the Forest (2024), a video animation made from tattoos of trees that were collected from the public. Together with other works, they show how the Mildes’ signature use of relatable and commonplace things is deployed to bring the much vaster question of nature into view. From newspapers to cars and plastic bags, each becomes a bridge to something that is obscured in our regular experience of them, such as their material production, colonial history, or impact on the environment.
Elsewhere, boundaries between domestic and wild are blurred, such as in In-Tree-Net. Presented in a unique configuration for Gallery 3, the work literally brings the outside in through the guise of interior pipework or cabling that might otherwise go unnoticed. Interrogative but never intrusive, it illustrates an ongoing commitment to work directly with materials from their field rather than to represent them.
This exhibition is part of the Kunsthalle Invites series, where Kunsthalle Praha supports emerging and local artists to realise new works and exhibit them in Gallery 3.