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.

Rafani Art Apartment in the Heart of the City
Curator: Pavel Kubesa
5. 3. - 14. 4. 2019

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RAFANI
ART APARTMENT IN THE HEART OF THE CITY: a visitor's guide

Welcome to Prague!
Welcome to its heart!
Welcome to the apartment run by the Rafani artistic group!

About us:
Czech art group Rafani was founded in 2000 along clearly defined democratic principles. The group’s work is centered around collective approach and engagement, with focus on general current affairs. Rafani have long been concerned with public space art, exhibitions of structural concept, as well as with the metaphoric possibilities of art conceived as an instrument with the potential to activate local environment and site-specific discourse. Rafani have been producing exhibitions, performances, videos and interventions based on a comprehensive detailed planning process, evolved on a generous scale and laying emphasis on the simplicity and functionality of the definitive form.

If you’d like to visit us, you can find us here:
RAFANI STUDIO:
Bořivojova 81, Praha 3 - Žižkov
Phone: +420 604 836 415

If we are not in the studio, we might be found right next door (mostly on Monday nights):
Hospůdka nad Viktorkou
Bořivojova 79, Praha 3 - Žižkov
Smoking is allowed there.
Note: open from 17:00!

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As we are artists, we would like to recommend visiting several exhibitions in places that we love and/or our artistíc friends have exhibitions there or they are run by people we appreciate.

We love Marcel, because he has started IT all. It’s weird his exhibition is here...
Marcel Duchamp: The prefix of our time
19. - 24. 03. 2019
GALERIE VÁCLAVA ŠPÁLY
Národní 30, Praha 1

Economy? Hearing? That’s a thing?
Economy of hearing
7. - 24. 03. 2019
GALERIE AMU
Malostranské náměstí 12, Praha 1

Filip is young, he is not a talent anymore, he is an established artist…
Filip Dvořák – Black Lantern
1. 03. - 14. 04. 2019
STONE PROJECTS
Šimáčkova 24, Praha 7

Polansky Gallery is a private gallery, similar to the galleries in London or New York or elsewhere, but Prague is Prague…
Leon Eisermann – A Long Goodbye
28. 02. - 20. 04. 2019
POLANSKY GALLERY
Veletržní 45, Praha 7

Lito Kattou – Gaia
28. 02. - 20. 04. 2019
POLANSKY GALLERY

New gallery with a progressive program. What is that progress?
Outside the Planetary Commitment
16. 03. - 28. 04. 2019
LÍTOST
Přívozní 1054/2, Praha 7

Jelení Gallery is a legendary place and the fact that it was originally located elsewhere doesn’t change it...
Barbora Dayef – Horovo oko, a. s.
27. 2. – 24. 3. 2019
GALERIE JELENÍ
Centrum pro současné umění Praha
Dukelských hrdinů 500/25a, Praha 7

We have an exhibition here:
Rafani – O nevyvratitelnosti
15/3/2019 - 16/6/2019
MUSEUM KAMPA
U Sovových mlýnů 2, Praha 1- Malá Strana

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If you want to get out of Prague, we recommend that you take the train from the Central Station to Kutna Hora (Gothic! Bones!). In an hour you are on the spot.

Or head north. Maybe to Most. There it looks completely different than in Prague.

Or to Karlštejn. There it looks like the Czech Republic in the nineties. We recommend you take a snack/lunch with you

And/or just go to Stromovka. Everyone goes there. Especially at the weekend.

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Ensure you don’t rent the Lime! scooters. The Prague pavements were never designed for these.

To travel Prague by Uber, Taxify or “regular” taxi? It’s a question of morals versus economics.

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WALK 1:
When you get out of the flat to Dlouhá street, you’ll reach Revoluční street. Turn left, go straight, cross the bridge, and walk up by the tunel. You will reach Letenské sady. It’s nice there. Note: Letná is popular hipster place, so it’s expensive there.

WALK 2:
If you are a hipster, go to Krymská street.

WALK 3:
Jogging? By the Vltava river to Modřany and further.

WALK 4:
You are not a hipster, but flâneur? Explore Prague’s passages/arcades.

WALK 5:
If you are a brutalist architecture fan, run to Transgas on Vinohradská street. It’s being demolished.

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Warning: According to a Harvard University research study, the Czechs rank at the top of the EU racial prejudice scale.

JÁ, DIAGNÓZA / + - VeDvou

Radek Brousil & Viktor Timofeev: The Hammer Strikes the Bell

MICHAELŮV MASHUP

27 LITRŮ UMĚLÝ KRVE / Janek & Natálka & kol.

27 LITRŮ UMĚLÝ KRVE / Janek & Natálka & kol.

27 LITRŮ UMĚLÝ KRVE / Janek & Natálka & kol.

MICHAELŮV MASHUP

FAKE CRIME / Joke Division

MICHAELŮV MASHUP

UNDERGROUND COMEDY CLUB

HAMU Graduate Choreography Showcase

ŠPIONI / Brémy

JÁ, DIAGNÓZA / + - VeDvou

JAK SE DĚLÁ DIVADLO / Divadlo MASO

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.

THE LEGEND OF LUNETIC / Janek & Natálka & kol.

SCAMMERS ATTACK / Janek & Natálka & collective

SCAMMERS ATTACK / Janek & Natálka & collective

FAKE CRIME / Joke Division

THE LEGEND OF LUNETIC / Janek & Natálka & kol.

THE LEGEND OF LUNETIC / Janek & Natálka & kol.

THE LEGEND OF LUNETIC / Janek & Natálka & kol.

27 LITRŮ UMĚLÝ KRVE / Janek & Natálka & kol.

27 LITRŮ UMĚLÝ KRVE / Janek & Natálka & kol.

27 LITRŮ UMĚLÝ KRVE / Janek & Natálka & kol.

UNDERGROUND COMEDY CLUB

JAK SE DĚLÁ DIVADLO / Divadlo MASO

THE LEGEND OF LUNETIC / Janek & Natálka & kol.

THE LEGEND OF LUNETIC / Janek & Natálka & kol.

THE LEGEND OF LUNETIC / Janek & Natálka & kol.

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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RAFANI ART APARTMENT in the Heart of the City