How can one depict the city today when it is no longer merely an urban whole, but also a psychic landscape, a data infrastructure, and a space of permanent tension? And how can one grasp the metropolis at the moment when its everyday reality breaks down into layers of personal projections, collective affects, and invisible systems that shape our movements, relationships, and modes of perception? The international exhibition project The Hammer Strikes the Bell by New York-based Latvian artist Viktor Timofeev and Czech artist Radek Brousil, prepared together with curators Boris Ondreička and Pavel Kubesa for Prague’s NoD Gallery, enters precisely this field of meaning. Here, the city does not appear as a stable backdrop, but as a living, multilayered organism in which subjective experience collides with the logic of late-postmodern infrastructures. The joint project by Brousil and Timofeev is conceived as a complex exhibition situation in which images, drawings, and a spatial site-specific installation are interwoven into a scenographic whole. The exhibition reflects the specific chronotope of the metamodern gigapolis — a city that is simultaneously a concrete place and a mental state, a set of material structures and a field of imagination. The artists are interested in the intricate image of buildings, people, technologies, and collective psyche that emerges from the structures of today’s metropolises. The exhibition is therefore not built on a mere dialogue between two media or two artistic signatures. More important is the very nature of their encounter: both Brousil and Timofeev have long cultivated a sensitivity to what remains beneath the surface of the visible world, whether power regimes, infrastructures, cultural codes, or unspoken models of identity. From this perspective, The Hammer Strikes the Bell transforms the gallery space into a situation in which the city becomes not only a theme, but also a method. The viewer does not enter a closed narrative, but rather a mutable scenery in which a wide range of individual and collective dramas may unfold. Viktor Timofeev (*1984), whose practice clearly extends beyond the framework of Central and Eastern Europe, is an internationally established artist living and working in New York, whose interdisciplinary practice brings together drawing, painting, video, sound, software, and experimental games into complex environments situated at the intersection of autofiction, worldbuilding, and systems thinking. In 2025, he presented his most extensive museum exhibition to date, Other Passengers, at the Latvian National Museum of Art in Riga; he has also exhibited at the Hessel Museum of Art in New York, Bozar in Brussels, and the National Gallery in Prague. Radek Brousil (*1980) enters this dialogue as an artist who has long reflected on the relationship between image, material, and social reality. In his post-photographic approach, he combines photography with textile, object, video, installation, and painting, and consistently engages with socio-political and environmental themes, postcolonial tendencies, and the question of a “new sensibility.” His work grows out of a critical relationship to standardized interpretations of late capitalism, the Anthropocene, and global power relations, and has increasingly also turned toward the politics of time. Brousil is among the notable figures of the Czech art scene with strong international experience, as confirmed by his projects in London, Brussels, Budapest, Tokyo, and other institutions.
This event is in Czech only!
This event is in Czech only!
This performance is in Czech only!
This event is in Czech only!
This performance is in Czech only.
An evening of graduation projects by third-year choreography students at the Academy of Performing Arts (HAMU). Nadkroví Barbora Sváčkov…
This performance is in Czech only!
This performace is in Czech only.
This performance is in Czech only!
This performance is in Czech only!
This performance is in Czech only!
Scamming is art. They have been with us since the beginning of mankind. They are all around us. And they are more and more of them. There´s no place you…
Scamming is art. They have been with us since the beginning of mankind. They are all around us. And they are more and more of them. There´s no place you…
This performance is in Czech only!
This performance is in Czech only!
This performance is in Czech only!
This performance is in Czech only!
This performance is in Czech only.
This performace is in Czech only.
This performance is in Czech only!
This performance is in Czech only!
This performance is in Czech only!
This performance is in Czech only!
This performance is in Czech only.
This performance is in Czech only!
This performance is in Czech only!
This performace is in Czech only.
Scamming is art. They have been with us since the beginning of mankind. They are all around us. And they are more and more of them. There´s no place you…
Scamming is art. They have been with us since the beginning of mankind. They are all around us. And they are more and more of them. There´s no place you…
This performance is in Czech only!
This performance is in Czech only.
Inside the tent there is a smaller tent, and inside the smaller tent there is a boy. He has travelled a long way. He has travelled mostly on his own. He can show the things he has brought with him, he can tell the reasons for his journey, he can tell about the route he has taken, he can’t tell you where the story ends...
We Come from Far Far Away follows the story of two boys from Aleppo who travel to Norway. It’s a road trip type of story – from Turkey to Greece and then to Macedonia and so on – all the way to Oslo. But it’s also a complicated story, its about things and people and places and also, significantly, about life and death.
Performed by: Iva Moberg, Robert Orr, Julia Masli, Václav Kalivoda
Director: Alex Byrne
Dramaturgy: Kjell Moberg
Lighting design: Šimon Kočí
Set design, Costumes: Kateřina Housková
Music Director: David Hlaváč
Technician: Jan Sháněl Producers: Iva Moberg & Uta Gildhuis
Established in 2001, NIE rehearsed its first three shows in the old Sokol gymnastic hall in Mšeno, a small town in the north of the Czech Republic. Those three shows – My Long Journey Home, Past Half Remembered and The End of Everything Ever – won numerous awards and performed all over the world, from Oslo to Mexico City, from Edinburgh Fringe Festival to New York, London, Moscow and Seoul. Since 2001 NIE have gone on to create new shows in co-production with venues and theatre companies from across Europe, including site-specific work and theatre for younger audiences.
Over the past 17 years, NIE have created 28 shows and performed in 36 countries more than 5000 times in over 1000 places across four continents.
www.nie-theatre.com