Memory of Touch unfolds in a time that rewards control, certainty, conflict, and immaculate surfaces—a cultural landscape that celebrates efficiency and visibility while concealing what is unguarded, tentative, and imperfect. Against such imperatives, the exhibition offers a quiet counterpoint, turning our gaze toward fragility and vulnerability—not as shortcomings, but as gestures of resilience. To be open, to remain permeable in the face of risk, is not weakness; it is a conscious form of presence and action. From this sensibility, we enter the collection not as a linear chronology, but as a constellation of moments, impressions, and echoes.
The Kunsthalle Praha collection does not appear here as a commentary on history but as an undercurrent—quiet, persistent, and formative. It “choreographs” the works not as subjects but as atmospheres; not as lessons but as pulses that ask what the past awakens in us, how it lingers in memory, and how it continues to shape the present. From here, the exhibition turns toward invited contemporary artists—a generation shaped by transition, not from one stable world to another, but within a landscape of shifting systems, dissolving certainties, and fragile forms of belonging. Not those who repeat past forms, but those who inherit their emotional registers: alertness, rupture, and the necessity of quiet insistence.
Through the interplay between the collection and the invited artists, various dialogues emerge—between intimacy and distance, discomfort and pleasure, material and ephemeral. These tensions establish fragility as a method, not as a theme, while the exhibition structurally unfolds in two complementary chapters: the first explores it as a form of resistance, the second as a lived condition and presence and together they form a single movement that binds the aesthetic, historical, and affective ideas. Across generations, artists fracture form, work with unstable materials and disrupt concepts to ignite 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 bring a wide spectrum of media into deliberate juxtaposition—painting, drawing, installation, sculpture, photography, and video—reawakening the past within the urgencies of the present. And in doing so, they assert fragility as a living language of our time: delicate yet resilient, uncertain yet generative."
