Exhibition: Zorka Lednárová – Geographies of Touch
Venue: Koloman Sokol Gallery
Exhibition duration: 4 February 2026 – 16 May 2026
Curator: Jana Babušiaková

When someone touches you, it evokes a whole spectrum of emotions – surprise, uncertainty, perhaps tenderness. Touch can be a transformative experience in which we become aware of sudden closeness, but also of a fundamental separation – if we were not autonomous beings, we could not meet in touch. Yet for a brief moment, touch allows us to be unified.

The central concept of Zorka Lednárová’s exhibition is precisely touch – in both a broad and deeply personal sense. Although she is an artist rooted in sculpture, she works with a wide range of artistic media: installation, object, painting, performance, video, and activist interventions in public space. Her sculptural training may well have laid the foundation for her spatial generosity – she is unafraid of large-scale realizations or monumental formats that nonetheless remain closely attuned to the human scale.

The exhibition, held at the Koloman Sokol Gallery as the laureate exhibition of the most recent Portrait Triennial (2024), presents her works across a wide conceptual and temporal span. Many previously unexhibited works were created over more than twenty years, and the articulated spaces of the Pongrác Curia allowed us to divide her extensive oeuvre into intuitively composed chapters. The exhibition is not a retrospective but rather an alternating immersion into Lednárová’s practice, which – however thematically wide-ranging – ultimately finds a shared foundation in humanity and the (borderless) nature of human experience within one’s own body and society.

Touch appears in her works as an act of confrontation, empathy, memory, and resistance. Through it, the artist maps invisible boundaries that arise not only in the architecture of cities but also within cultural, political, and mental structures.

These approaches can be seen, for example, in her fascination with maps and writing systems that determine the world in which we live. Political borders naturally divide it into zones defined by power, yet Lednárová explores language as a force that creates an entirely different map. Her pseudo-archaeological golden objects function as fragments and testimonies of a period in human history at the turn of the century. The railway sleeper that carries them evokes multiple meanings, all of which point to movement – whether in the form of journeys, expeditions, and the colonization of the world, or in the sense of constant transformation and impermanence.

The symbol of the preciousness and value of gold also appears in the non-gallery space of the cellar, into whose raw environment she entered with a site-specific intervention. Both works in this space are deeply personal testimonies as well as universal metaphors of human fragility. The heart, as the essential instrument of life, is absent here, yet its presence persists in traces and in the memory of its “repairs.” These are elevated through the gilding of the artist’s own pacemaker or through an EKG record combined with the Japanese technique of kintsugi, which, like gold-repaired ceramics, does not lose value – on the contrary, it gains it.

Eastern philosophy is very close to Zorka Lednárová. Its emphasis on harmony and the acceptance of contradictions rather than fighting them, on the beauty of imperfection rather than the pressure for perfection, can be traced in the meditative painting series Enso – tertium Quid. Enso, a principle of Zen Buddhism, is a circle painted in a single brushstroke, symbolizing the universe and unity. Its imperfection is welcome – Enso is not meant to be an image but an act. Lednárová has shifted this one-stroke circle into a doubled perfection-in-imperfection by painting the circles with the wheel of a wheelchair – an object designed for a body with a disability.

The position of harmony in the world, also present in Eastern philosophies, is familiar from the symbol of yin and yang – the positive and negative halves of a circle forming an inseparable whole. In this spirit, the series Similarities was created on handmade paper, in which the artist developed her own visual language – a system of symbols that do not represent individual letters or words but carry deeper, universal meaning. From a single matrix, one positive and one negative impression were always created, like two parts of a single event or situation that we usually perceive only from one perspective.

Confrontation with her own body, which itself becomes an obstacle, forms a significant theme that Lednárová has explored in recent years. The video performance Angel, installed together with the resulting painting, speaks of surrendering control over one’s own body, of pain and the undeniable barriers of an ill body, while effort and cooperation are crowned by at least the symbolic gaining of wings prepared for flight.

The corridor before the entrance to the Knight’s Hall is dedicated to physical barriers and limitations on the streets and in our minds. Here we present the activist dimension of Lednárová’s work, which, from the position of a person with a physical disability, confronts a system in which she remains invisible even in the 21st century. Public space and transportation are adapted to a “model body.” Yet any of us may fall outside this template – due to health limitations, aging, or motherhood. These are natural conditions, but the changed needs of bodies are not taken into account. A healthy person perceives public space differently, and therefore Lednárová, through guerrilla actions and participatory engagement of diverse groups in urban environments, mediates an alternative experience. This includes interventions using objects: enlarged steps that created an insurmountable barrier in real time and space, or marking public places with stickers indicating inaccessibility for wheelchair users.

Zorka Lednárová’s movement along the edges of geographical maps, social structures, and her own physical capacities does not affirm these boundaries but continually disrupts them. In this movement, the vision of a potentially unified world opens up – one in which difference is not an obstacle but a point of encounter. This idea is symbolically concluded by the lightbox in the foyer, where the wheelchair symbol gradually dissolves into a meadow in full bloom – an image of a world in which boundaries do not disappear through force but through acts of sharing and solidarity.

Jana Babušiaková