NoD

Radek Brousil & Viktor Timofeev: The Hammer Strikes the Bell

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.

Galerie NoD
Barbora Zentková & Julia Gryboś
Moonflower
Curated by: Pavel Kubesa
Text by: Ján Gajdušek & Tereza Havlovicová
27. 11. 2025 – 10. 1. 2026
Opening: 26. 11. 2025, 18:00

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To immerse oneself in music as if beneath the surface.
To dive even deeper. Into oneself. Into memories. Safe and soft.

To separate the artistic practice of Barbora Zentková and Julia Gryboś from music seems almost impossible. It is precisely music that completes the context of all the layers of the exhibited works, forms, materials, and processes. It definitively consolidates the conceptual framework. It offers a clue as to which path we, as visitors to the exhibition, might take: whether outward, along a rational route, examining the socio-critical levels of the works, the history of the materials used, environmental contexts and much more; or inward, into our own interior, thoughts, free associations, the unconscious. It is music that most insistently guides us toward immersion – first into its own flow, tones, and rhythm, and then into our own depths.

Danger is sharp. Safety is soft.
The past. Can memories ever truly be impersonal?

The exhibition space is softened by layers of gauze and textiles. The floor is covered with recycled linen and cotton fabrics. Every step here feels softer. What exactly is this softness like? Freshly fallen snow? Could it be the softness of moon dust? A sleeping mat? Fallen autumn leaves? Spring moss? None of these images is exact, and yet there is something of each in it – something pleasantly familiar, close and safe.

The layers of fabric return us to the theme of time, which, in a broader horizon, cannot be perceived outside of layers. Through them, time is inscribed into tree trunks and rocks, just as our memories are stored at different depths of recollection, with access to them shifting over the course of a lifetime. The mention of vegetal nature (tree), inanimate matter (rock) and the human is no coincidence. Flow, immersion, rhythm, temporality, recyclability, processuality – all these are categories that connect the human with the non-human, with nature, the environment, the past, the “natural”. The exhibition is not detached from the world “out there”. It follows on from it, responds to it. Temporal, bodily and social frameworks intertwine in the exhibited works, rendered in a subtle symbolism that points to our collective and individual experiences of time and to their limitations.

To walk all the way to the end and set out in the opposite direction.

If we are able to truly immerse ourselves in the works of Barbora Zentková and Julia Gryboś – ideally repeatedly and over a longer duration – a natural desire arises to understand that from which this experience grows. A more rational perspective leads us to the materials and layers of meaning: the textiles on the floor were originally intended to protect agricultural soil, the gauze carries a history of caring for the wounded body, and the recycled wax in the metal floral verticals re-enters circulation. The motif of protection is thus inscribed directly into the structure of the installation, and it is up to us to reflect on how we, as a society, position ourselves in relation to it – whom we protect and who is left without support.

The perception of time is revealed in its cultural and social conditionality, which affects both individuals and society as a whole. Within this framework, we may understand the exhibition title Moonflower (Ipomoea alba) as an apt metaphor. It is the name of a plant that opens at night and closes again at dawn, living in a cyclical, “non-productive” time outside the daytime “regime of performance”. In a similar way, Gryboś and Zentková create environments in which one can temporarily step out of linear, performance-oriented time and enter a time that is lived, embodied, and rhythmic. Their demanding, long-lasting, often repeated material processes and open-ended sound events (limited only by fatigue) recalibrate our sensitivity to work, care, and exhaustion. The exhibition thus discreetly suggests that alongside “useful” and “wasted” time, there also exists time that is “lived and shared” – and that sustainability here is not only a matter of recycling, but also a form of attention that requires perseverance, cooperation, and a willingness to stay with the material and with others, just as the moonflower itself needs enough time and darkness in order to bloom.

Ján Gajdušek & Tereza Havlovicová

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Barbora Zentková (*1986) and Julia Gryboś (*1988) have been collaborating as an artistic duo since 2010. A constant in their work is a dialogue with the medium of painting, which they studied, yet they significantly distanced themselves from its standard conception already in their joint diploma project, defended in 2013 at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Brno University of Technology (where they also completed their doctoral studies in 2023). Since the mid-2010s, they have focused primarily on site-responsive interventions and installations, which often become the setting for performative sound events.

Barbora Zentková comes from Slovakia, Julia Gryboś from Poland; they currently live and work in Berlin. The stable background of their Berlin studio, where they have worked since 2020, has brought a more intense interest in object-making and in the craft of working with materials into their practice. This shift was heralded by the exhibitions One-Legged Pigeon (Galerie Kostka) and Teabags on Eyelids (Galerie TIC Brno) in 2021. Without abandoning the site-responsive character of their practice, in recent years they have also moved towards a stable, clearly recognizable visual language based on a combination of hand-dyed textiles, metal and wax. This has been strongly articulated especially in exhibitions realized over the past two years in Germany, Slovakia, Poland, and, in 2022 (as part of the MOVE festival), also at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

JÁ, DIAGNÓZA / + - VeDvou

Radek Brousil & Viktor Timofeev: The Hammer Strikes the Bell

MICHAELŮV MASHUP

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27 LITRŮ UMĚLÝ KRVE / Janek & Natálka & kol.

27 LITRŮ UMĚLÝ KRVE / Janek & Natálka & kol.

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JAK SE DĚLÁ DIVADLO / Divadlo MASO

THE LEGEND OF LUNETIC / Janek & Natálka & kol.

THE LEGEND OF LUNETIC / Janek & Natálka & kol.

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FAKE CRIME / Joke Division

UNDERGROUND COMEDY CLUB

27 LITRŮ UMĚLÝ KRVE / Janek & Natálka & kol.

27 LITRŮ UMĚLÝ KRVE / Janek & Natálka & kol.

27 LITRŮ UMĚLÝ KRVE / Janek & Natálka & kol.

THE LEGEND OF LUNETIC / Janek & Natálka & kol.

THE LEGEND OF LUNETIC / Janek & Natálka & kol.

JAK SE DĚLÁ DIVADLO / Divadlo MASO

SCAMMERS ATTACK / Janek & Natálka & collective

SCAMMERS ATTACK / Janek & Natálka & collective

JÁ, DIAGNÓZA / + - VeDvou

FAKE CRIME / Joke Division

UNDERGROUND COMEDY CLUB

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Julia Gryboś & Barbora Zentková: MOONFLOWER