Memory of Touch: Chapter I

Memory of Touch: Chapter I
The Kunsthalle Praha Collection in Dialogue

19/6 2026—8/10 2026
Gallery 3

Curator: Tevž Logar
Scientific Associate: Barbora Ropková (Collection Curator at Kunsthalle Praha) 

Exhibiting artists from the Kunsthalle Praha Collection: Zbyněk Baladrán, Jiří Černický, Agnes Denes, Emil Filla, Tomislav Gotovac, Milan Knížák, Jiří Kovanda, Jiří Kolář, Běla Kolářová, Jitka Kolínská, Eva Koťátková, Bohumil Kubišta, Heinz Mack, Frank Joseph Malina, Ján Mančuška, Haroon Mirza, Jaromír Novotný, Theodor Pištěk, Marie Rychlíková, Edita Schubert, Kurt Schwitters, Ira Svobodová, Jindřich Štyrský, Goran Trbuljak

Invited exhibiting artists: Jakub Choma, Lukáš Hofmann, Igor Hosnedl, Valentýna Janů, Marie Lukáčová, Roman Štětina

Memory of Touch, an exhibition unfolding across two successive chapters, is the first major exploration of the Kunsthalle Praha Collection. It treats the collection as an open and evolving entity and sets historical, post-war, and contemporary works in dialogue with invited artists from the Czech scene, allowing their ideas and attitudes to open the collection outward and generate new resonances. These dialogues are taking place 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. The exhibition offers a quiet counterpoint to such imperatives, turning our gaze towards fragility and vulnerability – not as shortcomings but as gestures of resilience. Being open and remaining exposed to risk is not a weakness; it is a conscious choice to be present. From this position of sensitivity, we enter the collection through a non-chronological constellation of moments, impressions, and echoes.

The exhibition’s title, which took shape at the very beginning of the project during a conversation with the invited artist Valentýna Janů in her studio, connects chapters I and II while also suggesting that history is not a distant abstraction. Rather, it is something that resides in the body, in the material, in the touch and gesture; it remains as a residue on the surfaces and in the ways we approach or withdraw, remember or forget. Memory of Touch: Chapter I is devoted to fragility and vulnerability as aesthetic and political strategies that are revealed through the conceptual, visual, and material dimensions of an artwork. We do not think of them as passive states but as active forces through which artists of different generations deconstruct and reshape forms and ideas in order to respond to the instability of the world. Resonances arise between early avant-garde experiments, post-war practices marked by censorship and repression, and contemporary works, especially by the invited artists. Their creations mirror today’s uncertainties through disordered narratives, unstable materials, and fragmented bodies. The interweaving of works in this chapter leaves meanings open – like a silent space in which touch does not end on the skin but persists as a memory, a trace, and the possibility of a different world.

During the exhibition, visitors will have access to a multilingual audioguide created in collaboration between Kunsthalle Praha and the Cabinet of Wonders platform.

THE KUNSTHALLE PRAHA COLLECTION

The Kunsthalle Praha Collection is a living and continuously evolving body of works, now comprising more than two thousand pieces of art. It focuses on key artistic expressions and tendencies of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in central Europe, viewed within broader international contexts. Its basis lies in the collection of the Pudil Family Foundation, which is on long-term loan to Kunsthalle Praha. The Kunsthalle Praha Collection also includes the Fluxus Collection of Marie and Milan Knížák, which is a testament to the significant role that artist Milan Knížák played for Fluxus behind the

The collection is conceived as an open entity which continues to expand not only through the institution’s own a acquisitions but also through collaboration with partners and long-term loans. Although not on permanent display, the Kunsthalle Praha Collection is both the institution’s memory and one of the pillars of its identity. It develops in close relation with the exhibition programme – both operate independently while remaining in continuous dialogue.

GALLERY

CHAPTER II

PROGRAMME FOR THE EXHIBITION

EXHIBITION PARTNERS