Kunsthalle announces new exhibitions for the year 2024

"Year 2023 was dynamic, filled with inspiring encounters with art and friends. We unveiled a total of five new exhibitions, organized hundreds of educational and accompanying programs, and welcomed a total of 101 592 visitors, with 35% being under the age of twenty-six. The number of our members exceeded eleven thousand. Among the most successful exhibitions were Bohemia: The Story of a Phenomenon, 1950-2000, the exhibition READ by the duo Elmgreen & Dragset, and the Czech audiovisual project The Grief of Misfit Cathedrals, which we extended until January 19, 2024, due to high demand. Not only the numbers but also the significant amount of local and international acclaim suggests that Kunsthalle is able to appeal to a truly broad audience with its rich offering of exhibitions, program activities, design shop, and café or bistro, whether it be local or international," summarizes the year 2023 the CEO of Kunsthalle Praha, Ivana Goossen.

"We look forward to the year 2024, when we will continue to develop Kunsthalle as a vibrant place that brings constantly new stimuli. Through the work of artists, we will continue to address important contemporary topics and create space where people can create, discover, and share," she adds.

John Sanborn: Notes on Us

6 March—3 January, 2024
Gallery 3
Curated by: Barbora Ropková

Kunsthalle will premiere the first exhibition of the prominent American artist John Sanborn in the Czech Republic on March 1st of this year. Sanborn's work in the 1970s and 1980s was associated with experimental video art, and later this audiovisual creator played a role in the rise of MTV's music video aesthetics, much like the boom of contemporary digital art. Gallery visitors until June 2, 2024, will see his monumental nine-channel video installation "V+M" from 2015, which, together with another presented series of four videos titled "Mythic Status", explores themes of love, sexuality, and equal and fluid gender identity.

"Sanborn transforms poetic stories from ancient mythology with respect to today's gender-fluid society. I see the message of his work in equality and openness to differences, which can be very inspiring for viewers," explains Barbora Ropková, curator of the Kunsthalle Praha collection. The dynamic audio-visual and kinetic piece will envelop visitors along the perimeter of Gallery 3 under the overarching title "Notes on Us".

John Sanborn: V+M

Lucia Moholy: Exposures

30 May—28 October, 2024 
Gallery 1 & 2 
Curated by: Meghan Forbes, Jan Tichy and Jordan Troeller 

The life and work of the writer and photographer Lucie Moholy (1894–1989), originally from Prague, will receive its first comprehensive presentation in the Czech Republic thanks to Kunsthalle from May 30 to October 28, 2024. For a long time, her work remained in the shadow of her more famous husband, the Hungarian photographer and painter László Moholy-Nagy, even though it was Lucie who, through the lens of the camera, documented the activities of the legendary Bauhaus school in an extraordinary way. The exhibition, titled "Exposures" and curated by Meghan Forbes, Jan Tichý and Jordan Troeller, will fill some of the gaps in art history by drawing from newly discovered collections and archival documents to present the full range of Lucie Moholy's writings and photographs from the 1920s to the 1970s.

"Discovering Lucie Moholy was like a revelation. It turned out that Czechoslovak avant-garde photography, renowned mainly for the works of men such as František Drtikol, Jaromír Funke, and Jaroslav Rössler, also had representatives among women. Moholy evidently belonged to the countless female artists who were unjustly omitted from art history books. Later, I learned that she was rarely credited with the authorship of famous photographs she took during her time at the Bauhaus," describes Christelle Havranek, the curator of Kunsthalle Prague, the beginning of her interest in researching the exceptional work of this artist with Prague roots, practically undiscovered in the Czech Republic until now.

Lucia Moholy: Exposures

An integral part of the exhibition will also be photographs and video installations by artist and curator Jan Tichý, as well as two significant publications – alongside an extensive catalog (edited by Jordan Troeller, distributed by Hatje Cantz), there will be particularly Lucie Moholy's original text titled "One Hundred Years of Photography 1839–1939" (1939) in the first Czech translation by Jakub Hauser.

Ester Geislerová: What We Should’ve Said but Didn’t

28 June—13 September, 2024
Gallery 3

Kunsthalle will continue to showcase the work of the prominent visual artist Ester Geislerová in the exhibition running from June 28 to September 13, 2024. Symbolically, the artist will return to the site of her artistic endeavor from 2012 when she presented her thesis work at the former Zenger's transformation station. The installation "Quiz" from that time will now be replaced at Kunsthalle by a piece titled "What We Should Have Said and Didn't Say", in which the artist naturally continues to explore the theme of romantic relationships and communication, as well as the exploration of emotions and trauma.

Ester Geislerová: What We Should’ve Said but Didn’t

Chiharu Shiota: The Unsettled Soul 

28 November—28 April, 2025  
Gallery 1 & 2
Curated by: Christelle Havranek

The final exhibition at Kunsthalle for this year, "The Unsettled Soul" , will present the captivating work of the Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota. Her expansive spatial installations, reflecting on life, death, and interpersonal relationships, will engulf the two largest exhibition spaces at Kunsthalle from November 28, 2024, to April 28, 2025. Shiota is an internationally renowned artist who regularly exhibits in museums and galleries worldwide, from the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles (2023) and the Gropius Bau in Berlin (2019) to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in the UK (2018). In 2015, Shiota represented Japan at the 56th Venice Biennale.

Like all solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle, this one also originated from a meeting between the artist and the chief curator, Christelle Havranek. "Chiharu Shiota's unique mastery of museum space – she calls it 'drawing in the air' using woolen threads – pushes the boundaries of visual creation overall. She draws visitors into her poetic world filled with objects and shapes that resonate not only with our personal memories but also with our collective memory," reveals Havranek, who notes that Shiota's work combines influences from both Asian and Western cultures.

Chiharu Shiota: The Unsettled Soul