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.

Daniel Vlček: Through the eye of mechanical reproduction
Curator: Jiří Machalický
March 23 - April 21, 2017

Daniel Vlček is interested in the link between artistic representation and industrial production and the relationship between sound and its visual expression. Certain formats in his body of work have been adapted from forms of industry, a fact attested to by his consistent work with loops and repeated motifs. Originally it was the vinyl records he used as a DJ that defined the character of his paintings, works representing a specific template into which memory has been recorded. It was here that Vlček first tried to carry over musical elements onto the canvas, capturing musical practices via visual and artistic formats. At the same time, this work was based on the visualization of sound that had been the inspiration behind his drawings and paintings. In an almost constructivist way, he had attempted to ward off the surface while recording the rhythm found in the passing of time. This intention can be expressed as a spiral, the visual structure behind the principle of phonograph records. Vlček’s repeated motions based on a template are an intentionally mechanical method often resulting in abstract structures. This end result subverts the usual consequences of mechanical reproduction and draws attention to the true non-mechanical nature of Vlček’s practice.

Some of Vlček’s newest work features scanned archival photographs. The use of archival photographs is noteworthy as the photograph’s style, composition, and color can often betray the time of its taking. Despite being specific, these photographs cannot escape their existence as objects of mechanical reproduction. The traces of originality locked into the photograph’s style are erased by medium. This movement is taken a step further by today’s age of digital and virtual reproduction.

Vlček works with these photographs by scanning and printing them using a laser printer. These photographers are then adhered to canvases and completely covered with a layer of paint. This layer is in turn a meticulously etched away, gradually uncovering layers whose original content has been obscured in order to resurface as an entirely new structure. In these actions of embedding, covering, and revealing, Vlček copies mechanisms of memory.

Following years of experimentation and active practice, Vlček has arrived at a method derived from the fingerprint of memory and equipped with fragments of the past. He returns to the architecture of the decade in which he grew up, the eighties. Such a return marks a personal nostalgia while gesturing towards the properties of digital and virtual memory Vlček’s work is ultimately concerned with. This type of memory is always filled, only to be cleared away. As time passes, individuals die and take their memories with them. What remains is reproduced visual and historical memory. This form of memory is, however, tenacious, as it depends on visual and physical elements which, more than ever, can be easily manipulated. Vlček’s paintings work with this layering of memory, passing from the personal to the historical, crossing and covering over in an existence of fluctuation, forever gaining new rhythms and frequencies.

Vlček converts audio records into visual forms with the help of computer programs, leading to a manipulated digital audio format. Here he is interested in the motif of unstoppable time. This work also comes out of certain symbols related to contemporary lifestyle and one’s daily work with the computer. It is this day-to-day usage that opens up new possibilities, links seemingly unrelated meanings, and provides unexpected and unusual ways of expressing ideas.

Vlček has also been inspired by the creative principle of polyphony used, for example, in the Baroque period. This principle features closely related lines forming an “endless melody” which pervades music. A similar process takes places in Vlček's series of drawings, where this theme’s gradual evolution is illustrated through the demonstration of how stacked layers intersect and mechanically actuated straight lines and curves are connected, as well as what structure might create a slight alteration to the slope of a line. At the same time, the artist also makes use of accidents, an element inherent in every system that can make a composition truly special while creating surprisingly powerful effects.

For the NoD Gallery, Daniel Vlček has created a series of new paintings involving a destruction and mutation of original motifs from which new features or modules evolve. The current exhibition also presents a set of studies allowing for one to follow the development of the artist’s concepts and ideas. A sound installation, whose intertwining of two layers of sound in space is closely related to the exhibition’s visual component, is featured as well. The end result is a comprehensive solution developed for the gallery, where all elements serve a specific purpose while submitting to the artistic concept of the exhibition as a whole.

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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Daniel Vlček: Through the eye of mechanical reproduction