Beside Bodies

Beside Bodies
25th–27th of September, 10:00–18:00

Opening: 24th of September, 17:00, Part of Prague Art Week 2026

Artists: Anchan/Anna Daučíková, Virtue Village, Lenka Klodová, Ondřej Kubeš
Curators: Agáta Young Hošnová, Karolína Voleská

In Beside Bodies, curators Agáta Young Hošnová and Karolína Voleská trace emancipatory and queer approaches from the late 20th century to the present day, through gender performativity, critique of normative masculinity, and unstable ideals of beauty. The exhibition focuses on the changing of thought toward the body and bodily autonomy, systems of control and expectations connected to gender and sexuality, including family roles. Works by Virtual Village, Anchan/Anny Daučíková, Lenka Klodová, and Ondřej Kubeš explore corporeality as a space for personal and social experience to be inscribed as gestures and fragments of clothing: surfaces, reflecting performativity.
Feminist thought has historically focused primarily on the experiences and unequal status of women, gradually broadening to encompass analysis of gender as whole order of categorisation. Contemporary feminist and queer theory turns attention to structures of normativity and their role in the social expression of masculinity. For example, the expectancy-discrepancy-threat model developed by Stanaland, Gaither and Gassman-Pines (2023) situates these fragile structures in a paradigm of masculinity as emerging from the individual’s relation to themselves and the socialisation of their self-recognition. Masculinity, as such, is the comparison of one’s own behaviour with a conventionalised cultural ideal, the authority of which maintains the possibility of discord, and one’s failure to cohere. This, then, is the fragility that opens space for other forms of male corporeality: the sensitive, the queer, the melancholic, the open to doubt.
Clothing functions as a second skin, understood as a fluid boundary where the body encounters its surroundings at the same time as it is set apart from them. In close proximity to the skin, clothing assumes whatever shape it extends over the surface of, translating bodily presence further into the realm of signs. The fabric thus preserves the physical traces of contact as well as the implicit imprinting of roles and relationships and memory that accumulates around the body over time. Textiles and clothing are signs; our familiarity with them establishes a position in society, and their absence too is a sign, gendered and historically used to reinforce a hierarchy that has precipitated novel modes of interaction.
In “Home Exercise” (1997), Anchan/Anna Daučíková sews a pair of gloves together. The lens is uncomfortably close to the scene captured, focusing on the artist’s hands working, the needle piercing fabric, the gradual joining of two items. The gloves follow the shape of hands, mediating contact with the surroundings and representing touch. Sewing them together renders a new whole, in which a practical act is imbued with the suggestion of intimate sexual union. Daučíková uses the act of traditionally female domestic labour to articulate a language of gender neutral gestures. Sewing is repeated touch, merging, and penetration. “Home Exercise” thus establishes the situation of the exhibition: the body enters the frame through the hands, while the fabric develops their gestures, patient and intimate and material.
“David černý” (2009; literal translation “David black”) by the Czech performance and multimedia artist Lenka Klodová is a direct representation of the male body. Michelangelo’s David is reconstituted in polystyrene, an ironic paraphrase connecting the canon of the male nude with the name of provocative corporate artist David Černý, responding to his sculptural installation Enropa (2009), a satirical piece on the stereotypes of European Union members. Use of lightweight, affordable polystyrene gives the typology a transient form, altering its monumental character, playing with questions of value. The simple gesture of painting David black is a mischievous subversion of, and deliberate failure to fulfil, rigid notions of European beauty. A digital print in the gallery window introduces the fabulated image of a woman as a distorted advertising product, subject to desires and stereotyping, tying into the artist’s longstanding interest in caricaturing the tone of magazines aimed at specifically male or female audiences.
The familial dimension of clothing is the subject of “Homme Fatale” (2025) by the Hong Kong duo Virtue Village. Six wall-mounted objects draw on the history of the artists’ paternal families, manufacturers of silk ties. The tie is an archetype of male formal wear, a symbol of formality, professional status and self-control, all expectations of the wearer. This work recontextualises the tie as a “tie” to family business and patrilineage. The silk accessories exhibited feature portraits of the performer Waha, a long-time collaborator of Virtue Village. Waha’s expressions shift from tenderness to tension, defiance and anger, and through his photogenicity he draws on the multigeneric cinema of Hong Kong. The face on the tie incorporate a number of emotional states in the conventional representation of the male form. The absence of the patriarch raises the question of how ideals of masculinity transgress generational division.
Ondřej Kubeš focuses on rendering visible the emotions subdued in a macho heteronormative society. His work is framed by nostalgia, melancholy, and radical openness which, in purest form, is expressed through photographic self-portraiture. The central installation combines a metal structure with leather and printed fabric, resembling an empty wardrobe, a ‘silent servant’. The valet suggests subservient service, constituents of power silencing and exploiting those beneath them. The second prominent element of Ondřej’s work is the motif of freshwater pearl mussels. The pearl is an appropriated jewel, a symbol of wealth, and in biological reality a foreign object, a chance parasite, a grand of sand washed into the mussel by the current. Ondřej’s work plays with this internal tension, balancing bodily states while digesting scars and dysmorphia. Like the other artists exhibited in Besides Bodies, the artist seeks to gently challenge entrenched stereotypes of gender, performativity, and deviations that have led to emancipation.