Archive of projects

The project presents a body of objects and reliefs made from television screens, electronic components and fragments of technology. The artist works with the motif of disrupted communication and of shifting meaning at a time when the digital image pervades everyday reality completely. Into the surfaces of the screens he engraves fictitious reports and traces of unknown messages whose origin and sense remain unclear. In doing so he abandons the medium of the moving image itself and replaces it with a physical intervention into the material, with an engraved mark.

Sixty numbers relating to Roudnice nad Labem were read out over the town's public address system as part of the Proud festival. The voice that normally summons, warns and announces here only recites figures, without comment. The system remains a means of address; only the content passing through it changes, and with it what the listener takes to be a message.

The piece is made for a particular town and the figures are gathered afresh each time, so every realisation sounds different. Roudnice came in 2024, Liberec in 2026. Both recordings are below.

Fragments of objects of unknown origin and function. The remains of devices that once served to transmit information turn into artefacts of a world whose communication systems have failed. The objects have their insides exposed, as if they had been torn out of the sophisticated systems they belonged to.

The project deals with information, its flow, its interpretation and its eventual effect on the recipient through the media. The strategies at work here draw on participation, mystification, irony and engaged gesture. A spatial object built from almost fifty flat television screens pulls us into a Matrix-like world of streaming information, images, digital lines and hissing static.

The artist had a fridge and a washing machine run over by a tank, an action also shown in the video projection. The work dates from 2018, when he responded to the events of the late 1960s and the occupation of Czechoslovakia by Soviet troops. In this exhibition, however, the action takes on a new and far more menacing dimension: the tracks of the tank and the sheer menace of the war machine recall a conflict happening right now, very close to us, running through our lives and shouting at us daily from the television screen and other media.

The hidden part is a game of mystification in which the artist introduces the figure of Paul Nettle and his archive, appearing in the installation as photographs of an unknown man's face, as interactive dialogue windows on the gallery windows, and as odd printed matter scattered around the space. Who is Paul Nettle?

Hospital plastic sheeting partitioned the exhibition Art of Symbolism at the Roudnice gallery. The paintings stayed where they were but ended up behind a barrier meant for medical operations. The intervention left the display visible and inaccessible at the same time. For the length of the pandemic the gallery treated its own collection as endangered.

The silvered glass drops from the installation Local Problem move into portable cases. A work that in 2001 occupied a whole room is broken down into units that can be carried and installed anywhere. The prompt was the spread of commercial copies of the original. The atomisation is not a practical measure but a gesture: the work adapts to a market that has already appropriated it.

A cut glass object in the shape of a rocket engine. Electronics sense movement nearby and release steam at irregular intervals, as if the machine were preparing for launch. The engine is made of glass, a material that would not survive the first second of thrust. Merlin 2.0 plays at space propulsion while admitting that it is an aesthetic imitation of it.

A work marking the fiftieth anniversary of the 1968 occupation of Czechoslovakia. The artist had kitchen appliances run over by a Soviet T-55 tank. The video records the whole process without commentary and without music. A fridge and a washing machine are not military targets; they are the objects by which you can tell that somebody lives somewhere. The weight of the machine is brought to bear on things that have no defence, much like the lives of ordinary people.

In collaboration with Jiří Černický, the gallery in Roudnice nad Labem was turned into a military encampment. The artworks were cleared to the walls or removed altogether to make room for materiel and operations. The installation does not stage war, it stages its uncompromising consequences for culture. It shows how quickly a gallery can be requisitioned and put to another use.

In 1984 the artist was given a pair of Levi's, deep blue, orange tab, the uniform of the West. He wore them until 1999, hand-stitching every tear, adding patches, and finally sewing a gusset into the waist when he outgrew them. In 1999 the denim had thinned to the point of collapse and the trousers went into a box, interleaved with newspaper, where they stayed until 2015.

The archive gathers evidence of the life of Paul Nettle and of his encounters. Photographs, found objects and records keep accumulating, and their provenance remains undocumented. Nettle may not exist, but his file is growing and is kept with the same care as any other. The project has no end: every new addition makes the whole a little more credible.

In 1996 the play Sapphire Head was performed once, at Prácheň near Kamenický Šenov. Twenty-three years later the remains of the set, fragments of puppets and a VHS tape carrying part of a recording were found in a family cellar. The reconstruction does not try to revive the performance; it follows what is left of a work seen by a handful of people and written down by nobody. The legend here grew out of missing evidence, not acclaim.

The camouflage pattern of a military uniform serves as a score. An electronic sensor reads the blotches and fractals of the fabric and software turns them into tone, so the camouflage can be listened to. A pattern whose only job is to go unnoticed becomes audible. The composition is produced by moving a hand across the uniform and sounds different every time.

The gallery was turned into the press room of Strakova akademie, the seat of the Czech government. The lectern, the backdrop and the camera positions stay exactly as viewers know them from the evening news, except that anyone can now step into them and speak. The set works perfectly well without a government. The podium shows how much of authority is handled by the setting itself, before a single sentence is spoken.

The installation at the Via Art gallery in Prague assembles mirrors, photographs and a revolver into a set-up that measures performance. It asks how long a person can keep meeting rising demands for turnover, pace and volume of processed information. Rest does not figure in the equation. Heavy duty is a term from machine catalogues: it denotes the load a device is built for, not a state in which it feels well. The work points to overload and to the pressure to perform.

The glass object was made at the International Glass Symposium in Nový Bor and is a reminiscence of the work of Jeff Koons. Made of silvered glass, it points to the Czech tradition of roasting food over an open fire. What is being roasted is not a decent cut of meat but the work of another artist. The whole scene is like camping out in space.

An image is produced by high voltage in collaboration with the Nanofibre Laboratory at the Technical University of Liberec. Nanofibres settle more densely where the substrate conducts better, so the layout of conductive and non-conductive areas determines the resulting motif, much as on a printed circuit board. The image is the size of nanospace and cannot be seen without a microscope. The drawing here is made by physics, not by hand.

The video shows a father and a son moving in ways that briefly align and then diverge, in an endless loop. A semi-transparent mirror hangs in front of the projection: the viewer sees the recording and, in it, themselves. Three figures overlap in one image without knowing about each other. The repetition of gesture across generations appears here not as inheritance but as mechanism.

All that remains of the advertising banners are fields of colour and composition. Messages, brands and products have been taped over and removed. The intervention is cosmetic in the precise sense of the word: the surface changes, the composition stays. Even so, the empty areas keep their power to attract the eye. The installation is accompanied by a whispering girl's voice.

The installation imitates a police room with stored evidence. A city map marks ten locations the exhibited objects relate to, but nobody documents the connection between them. Viewers construct a hypothesis themselves, and they do it reliably, the arrangement alone is enough to prompt it.

A video projection shows images of nanofibre structure captured by an electron microscope in Liberec. A material made for filtration and medicine behaves in the gallery like landscape. Scale is the only thing separating a fibre from a rope and a pore from a valley. The eye recognises the shape long before it works out how big it is.

Two mirrored surfaces cut in the shape of a male figure stand facing each other and reflect one another into a depth that cannot be seen to its end. A viewer stepping between them becomes a third image and at the same time an obstacle: their presence breaks the series of reflections. The work addresses the various social roles of men.

A system of counting displays starts up only when somebody comes close. An optical sensor registers the movement, the red digits light up and begin to fall towards zero. The displays are of the type found on real explosive charges. Nothing goes off, but the countdown was started by the viewer and they cannot stop it. Danger coming from blinking numbers.

In a gallery space in Cleveland I built an exact copy of the Pentagon briefing room. The lectern, the flags and the layout match the original from which military operations are announced. The microphones are freely available to gallery visitors. A guarded, classified place is now open to anyone who wants to say something. I handed the political stage to those who normally never reach it. The work points to the power of the visual staging that only a chosen few get to use. That is what I wanted to change with it.

A hundred and one stills come from webcams transmitting live images from flats, offices and streets. Some of the people recorded know about the camera and perform for it; others do not. The selection is authored: moments in which nothing happens dominate. What surveillance rests on here is not exposure but the permanent availability of the image.

One hundred and fifty stills come from security cameras that stream images from public and private spaces straight onto the internet. Some of the people recorded know about the camera, others do not. Most of the frames are moments when nothing is happening. Here the camera is a weapon and the recording is ammunition that can be used against whoever appears in it. Surveillance is not about exposure but about the permanent availability of the recorded image. What the record is for remains unclear.

The speaking rifle belongs to a series of glass weapons and takes the form of an interplanetary blaster. Instead of firing it plays sound: the ammunition is English lessons escalating from basic phrases to an unbroken torrent. The aim is not to hit but to occupy attention. The weapon is made of cut silvered glass, a material meant for display rather than use.

A live image, captured behind the gallery wall, falls onto an array of seventy mirrors and breaks apart across the whole space. The viewer watches the street they have just walked down, split into dozens of reflections. The installation is complemented by the Minimax objects, presented as luxury technology, and by a geometric mirrored object that disappears in the flood of reflections around it. The outside is not transmitted here faithfully, but in whatever way suits the surface it lands on. Reality disintegrating through aesthetics.

The video follows the movement of the mechanisms of an automated production line in a loop with no beginning and no end. The machines do exactly what they were built to do and automatically compose a visual opera. The footage is neither sped up nor slowed down. The work points to a stereotyped way of life that, from a certain angle, is appealing. The beauty of technical equipment.

Seventy-two blown glass drops, silvered on the inside to a mercury shine, cling to the walls and ceiling like a contagion arriving from somewhere outside, from another civilisation. The installation is accompanied by a dark sound of water underground. The silvering technique was rediscovered by the artist together with his wife. For the finals of the Jindřich Chalupecký Award the drops took over the National Gallery; in 2019 they moved into the reservoir of the Kolín waterworks, joined by an edited soundtrack of water as a warning against the loss of this life-giving liquid. The shining surface attracts by its beauty and at the same time signals that something is wrong.

The installation builds a secret military laboratory where instruments with undocumented functions are at work, devices bear traces of malfunction, and operations evidently continue without any staff. May day is the international call for help. The laboratory looks abandoned and unfinished at once. The objects have a military aesthetic and an unknown function. The artist performs inside it, so the scene comes alive when nobody expects it.

Objects with invented functions are presented as conclusive evidence of an extraterrestrial presence. Visually they stick to the repertoire associated with the Nevada military base Area 51: makeshift equipment, poor light, pictures taken in a hurry. The fiction is maintained so precisely that it cannot be told apart from the truth. The objects and photographs are clear evidence. The point is not whether something landed in 1947, but how the confirmation of such certainty is manufactured.

A shelf in a beauty salon holds shampoo bottles that have been put through demanding carving. Cheap plastic has been given the kind of decoration otherwise reserved for glass or silver, and with it a claim to the display case. The work took more effort than the original product as a whole. The line between merchandise and collector's item is here a question of time invested. Value was given to waste plastic by handwork that returned a despised material to our attention.

Plate-like objects of slumped glass, coated with titanium, hang on the wall like screens that will never switch on. The highly reflective surface returns reality distorted and in motion. The display shows nothing, it only reflects whatever stands in front of it. A shiny, tempting surface is a trap for the perception of reality.

Advertising photographs of cars, made in collaboration with Mercedes-Benz ČR, are interleaved with ordinary shots of vegetables and flowers and discreetly altered so that attention falls on the irrelevant detail. The open bonnet of a perfect car reveals the mechanism that advertising is supposed to keep shut. Every perfect system has a place where it is vulnerable and where the potential fault lies. Vegetable beds matter more than the finest machine.

White shapes cut from Komatex were placed behind and immediately next to works by other artists in the exhibition Interior vs Exterior. They neither cover them nor disturb them; they merely attach themselves and start to be seen together with them. A parasite is recognised by having no meaning of its own, it needs its artistic host.

An interactive installation for the exhibition Orbis Fictus. In collaboration with the Prague company Meteopress I built a transmission system bringing satellite weather data into the gallery in real time. Infrared sensors convert the rows of figures into an image that changes according to what is happening in the weather over Europe. Without a visitor entering, only the numerical code is visible; in their presence the visual form of the numbers turns into an image of the clouds above us.

A site-specific project for Manifesta 1 in Rotterdam, created by the Dutch artist Robin Kolleman on the basis of a portfolio of my work at the time, offered a white space to live in. The artist actually lived there with Karolína Kopřivová for the duration of the Manifesta installation, so the sterile installation was gradually disturbed by ordinary household life: dirty dishes, laundry, traces of movement. The perfection of a clean space was changed by the everyday life of two people. At the end of our stay we arranged the white objects into a different composition so that the traces of our use of the room would show in full.

A light installation for Manifesta 1. A slide projection of a satellite image of an island falls onto mirrors shaped into human organs. The reflection on the opposite wall moves and looks as if the whole set-up were breathing. A coastline and a lung follow the same logic of division, only at a different scale. The view from orbit and the view inside the body are here, at first sight, equal. The outer has intersected with the inner.

An object of flat glass, lifted above the landscape by a truck crane. It was photographed so as to work as clear evidence of an unidentified object. The picture went to the regional press, the report was published and the ufology community responded. The fake news of its day did its job. The manipulation of the image was not done digitally back then; producing a convincing shot required heavy machinery and complicated logistics.

My diploma project at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague was shown at the E. Filla Gallery in Ústí nad Labem. Stands with mirrors are aimed at small objects on the wall, so the motifs can be seen only in reflection. A direct look misses them. The second part of the installation takes place in the dark, where the lights come on only when an infrared sensor picks up a visitor's movement. The light lasts so briefly that the motifs drawn on the wall cannot be made out. The viewer tries to turn towards the light, but the system is designed so that they have no chance of recognising what they glimpsed. It is an electronic system of spatial manipulation. Sometimes it is impossible to identify what I saw and I have to try again and again.

Ten LED panels made in collaboration with Siemens ČR measure human feelings and motives on a ten-point scale. In front of each panel a certain number of diodes lights up for the viewer, and at the same time affects the readings on the others. The numbers are generated at random, yet the array looks calibrated. The credibility of an instrument does not depend on what it actually measures.

The Fictions trilogy works with systems that the viewer takes, at first sight, to be self-evident and clear.

Logic as Fiction is an installation of a gigantic PC keyboard whose individual keys are made of ash. They gradually fall apart in the gallery. Above them stands the nonsensical equation 1 + 1 = 3.

Electric Fictions sets metal devices with bare wires and rusted joints across the gallery. Plugged into the mains and suspended, they are arranged so that a visitor has to pass between them. Ignorance of basic physical properties produced fear, and some viewers did not pass through the wall at all.

Garden Fictions offers do-it-yourself gadgets that solve nothing and do not work. These are pseudo-functional objects with the homemade aesthetic of found materials and amateur workmanship. The tools give the impression of being useful; the opposite is true.