All Things Digesting
Sikau/Pubalova
13/2 2026—11/5 2026
Gallery 3
ALL THINGS DIGESTING by the artist duo Sikau/Pubalova approaches the exhibition as an interactive playground for the senses – sight, smell, hearing, and above all touch. The title of the exhibition refers to the process of digestion, and the installations develop this motif of absorption, interconnecting both the themes and the bacteria that we encounter in everyday life, from microbial pathways to changing ecosystems. All six works invite an open, playful reading; their boundaries are soft and porous. Porosity is a digestive principle – permeable membranes allow the exchange of substances, fluids, and signals, through which the foreign becomes a part of us. In the same way, the works’ porous boundaries let impressions and stories be absorbed and transformed, growing into shared experience. This approach can also act as a form of care – leading from sensation to soothing, from sharing to well-being (a sense of mental and physical ease and balance). It creates a time and space to absorb ideas, scents, and textures. The spatial, sonic, and haptic gestures of the individual installations comprise a whole that breathes at its own pace and creates a flowing rhythm wafting through the space. Sound recordings of metabolism and fermentation lend the exhibition its tempo. These small events (the bubbling of viscera, the fermenting of microbes) translate into rhythms that the body can feel, expanding what can be considered a voice – and how we might heal through it.
At the centre of ALL THINGS DIGESTING is the rotating installation Turning Green. Created in collaboration with Kunsthalle Praha through a public open call, its sonic layer consists of the voices of participants who shared their personal experiences of eco-grief and eco-anxiety. The recordings overlap and interweave, opening up a space for a collective experience that can feel surprisingly intimate. Eco-grief and eco-anxiety refer to the natural feeling of sadness at the loss of the landscape and the tension arising from an uncertain future – emotions brought about by climate change that affect our relationships to places, species, and people.
Together the artists create situations of care. Visitors pass through an experience of sensitisation and mutual harmonisation. Play and sensory perception become ways of caring for oneself, for others, and for the environment. It is attunement rather than explanation – subtle gestures with a striking effect, teaching us how to be together within an open flow of events.
During the exhibition, visitors will have access to a multilingual audioguide created in collaboration between Kunsthalle Praha and the Cabinet of Wonders platform.
Since 2020, the duo Sikau/Pubalova has been exploring the intersection of media art and experimental opera, with commissions from and exhibitions at, among other places, Science Gallery Bengaluru, Ars Electronica, the European Commission, LABoral, and transmediale Berlin.
Denisa Půbalová (she/her) is an audiovisual artist and a researcher in the fields of environmental philosophy, critical posthumanism, and technological infrastructures. She also works as a creative coder at Woven Studio (with clients such as UNESCO, LVMH, and the Montreux Jazz Festival) and as a visual artist for Metanoia Creatives.
Dr. Lea Luka Sikau (she/her) is a multisensory artist, sound scholar, and mezzo-soprano. She earned a PhD from the University of Cambridge and is a fellow of the Mellon School of Theater and Performance Research at Harvard University. She focuses on post-anthropocentric approaches in opera and media art, and since 2024 she has served as the Curator for Music and Sound Art at ZKM | Karlsruhe.
