Prague
Country: Czech RepublicArea: 496 km²Population: 1.39 millionTime zone: GMT +1

Prague is the capital and largest city of the Czech Republic and the historical capital of Bohemia. Its name derives from the Old Slavic word práh, meaning crossing, due to its being situated on the Vltava river. Prague has seen three high-profile political incidents in which people were pushed from windows, in 1419, 1483 and 1618: these are known as the Defenestrations of Prague.

In the opening chapter of Pig Earth, the first book in John Berger’s Into Their Labours trilogy published between 1979 and 1990, he tells a story of the slaughter of a peasant farmer’s ageing cow. The farmer takes her to an abattoir where she is quickly and cleanly killed and taken apart limb from limb by its workers. As the peasant mulls his decision the abattoir workers silently dismember, weigh and pay him for the cow’s meat. He gets nothing for the tongue, liver, hooves, head or hide.

The peasant’s experience of the mechanisation of farming processes serves as an allegory for his integration into a colder capitalist system. This is further illustrated by the detached demeanour of the abattoir workers, already indoctrinated into its ideology.

For its third edition in June of this year, the international Biennale Matter of Art in Prague selected curators Aleksei Borisionok and Katalin Erdödi to create exhibitions relating to their respective research interests in labour unrest and rural change to be held in the city’s National Gallery Prague, Lidice Gallery and a number of smaller satellite sites. Listening to the pair introduce this year’s biennale in the National Gallery’s Small Hall I was reminded of an interview with John Berger in the New York Times. Speaking of his Into Their Labours trilogy Berger says, “I wanted to tell the peasants’ story before they were gone from the earth”. It was a quote that now seemed strange as I listened to curator Katalin Erdödi state that a staggering 2.2 billion peasants and small scale farmers are working in agriculture today. This amounts to roughly a quarter of the global population.

While Berger correctly anticipated the peasant’s forced integration into the global capitalist system, he appears to have wrongly assumed the way in which this change would happen. Rather than vanishing, a hybridisation seems to have occurred. The democratising power of capitalism as promised to peasants and workers, particularly in the Eastern Bloc, has not materialised – instead, conditions for urban workers now seem more akin to the feudalism experienced by peasant farmers. Rather than being subservient only to the king, farmers are now subject to the exploitation of multinational corporations and unaccountable governing bodies.

Using a methodology they refer to as grafting – both as in working hard and as in fusing organic material – this year’s Matter of Art curators combined their curatorial research to assemble a biennale which considered how the experiences of peasant farmers and urban workers of the past are relevant now. Together they presented a series of exhibitions which addressed historic and contemporary ideas about labour and the land and explored ways to bridge rural and urban divides and create solidarity between workers’ groups. As the pair finished introducing the biennale and its accompanying public programme, they shared two research questions to which they had frequently returned while planning the exhibitions: Who are the peasants? Who are the workers?

Pig Earth was the first novel in Berger’s Into Their Labours series on the lives of peasants in France, first published by Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative, run by Glenn Thompson, Sian Williams, Richard Appignanesi, Lisa Appignanesi, John Berger, Arnold Wesker and Chris Searle. The publishing house, now operating under the name For Beginners LLC, was first popularised thanks to its “for beginners” format, a series of educational graphic novels with Marxist values. These included titles such as: Marx for Beginners (1976), Lenin for Beginners (1977) and Freud for Beginners (1979).

Walking around the National Gallery Trade Fair Palace, which houses the biennale’s main exhibition, I noted how the idea of the essential hybridisation of the rural and urban as addressed by the curators seemed to permeate the surrounding neighbourhood of Holešovice: clusters of plants growing from cracks in the pavement, roads punctuated by mounds of rubble and building aggregate, workers congregated around construction sites, the stalks of wild grass hanging from the sealed door of a vintage Mercedes-Benz. The area, Borisionok later explained, has been undergoing rapid redevelopment. Formerly a heavily industrial suburb of the city, much of its housing stock was switching from public to private ownership, its shop fronts becoming dominated by high-end chains.

The National Gallery building, which houses the biennale’s main exhibition, appears to have been a nucleation point for this transition. The building, an example of Functionalist architecture from the 1920s, was formerly used to house domestic and international trade fairs. Its repurposing as a museum of modern and contemporary art in the mid-1970s anticipated the growing importance of culture as an economic force and tourism’s supplanting of industry in the urban economy.

Entering the Grand Hall, I was met by many of the same materials which lay scattered on the building sites of the street outside, utilised in the exhibition design by architects Dominik Lang and Adéla Vavříková. The otherwise cavernous gallery space was partitioned by partially unwrapped breeze blocks. Video and audio installations were powered by electricity pylons, both conceptually grounding the exhibition and remedying the lack of power sockets at floor level. Exhibition texts were attached to freestanding iron rebar, bent to resemble hammers, raised fists and other thematically relevant forms.

The first work I saw was the series Fence-Scape made by Hungarian artist duo Randomroutines, who repurpose steel rebar – a material used during socialism for prefab housing and public art – to make sculptures inspired by DIY decorative fences, window grids and flower racks. For the biennale they presented a set of eight fences which borrow the style of Eastern European folk art and socialist realism to depict scenes of environmental and societal collapse in the near future. Figures flee a fenced-off field now engulfed in flames. Workers pick fruit and vegetables as a city in the distance burns. A woman shouts down the phone as buildings outside her window collapse and her world literally crumbles around her. This use of an aesthetic typically utilised to celebrate the awesome power of collectivity is particularly terrifying when applied to scenes of apocalyptic destruction. Though unsettling it feels like an appropriate entry point to the exhibition, throughout which artists explore folk customs, national identity, labour conditions and the possibility of collectivism in the face of global conflict, physical and environmental exhaustion.

Archival image of women picking cotton in Uzbekistan, 1938-1951. Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies Collection, H.C. Fung Library

In a new work titled Taming Waters and Women in Soviet Central Asia, the research group DAVRA examined the Great Fergana Canal, a 270 kilometre-long canal between Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. The installation, a light blue curtain suspended from the ceiling on a piece of plywood cut to resemble the form of the Syr Darya River, was conceived as a means of exploring historic connections between the use and misuse of female labour and water. One side of the curtain was printed with archival materials from the group’s research. On the other, embroidered textiles were appliquéd to the fabric, while photographs of the canal and monitors playing archival footage made during its construction hung from the ceiling. The videos highlight the exploitation of femininity for industrial production. Groups of women are seen on their knees dancing the Paxta Raqsi (cotton dance). Huddled together they imitate growing cotton plants. Their torsos writhe in the soil, arms sway in the wind, fingers extend and wiggle, imitating seeds catching the air. Crowds of exhausted-looking men sit on the banks of the canal, leering. Alongside these videos, cotton pickers’ aprons are presented, embroidered with imagery that plays on the idea of nature as inherently feminine. One such apron was embroidered with ten conjoined breasts shaped like a river and its tributaries, surrounded by animals drinking from its teats and flowers which resemble breasts and vulvas. These scenes can be read both as critiques of the naturalisation of women’s bodies and the patriarchal domination of the planet: examining how the exhaustion of female labour has been reframed as a natural process, and illustrating how the exploitation of natural resources is a product of societies wired to dominate that which is perceived as feminine.

Elsewhere in the exhibition German artist Antje Schiffers contributed three videos each depicting the making and performance of a collaborative village play. Co-created with biennale curator Katalin Erdödi, these videos depict the artists entering rural communities and working with residents to translate local customs, practices and history into a play, in which villagers perform in a kind of variety show, telling the story of their community. For the exhibition Schiffers was commissioned to create an installation relating to the project. A giant fishing net was suspended from the gallery ceiling, serving as a kind of stage curtain behind which videos played on three monitors. Schiffers repurposed tractor tyres and medicine balls, seen in the films, for seating, and behind them hung on a gallery wall a kind of mood-board assemblage of research materials and documentation from the project. The resulting installation, which was meant to give the viewer the experience of stepping behind the curtain at one of her village plays, felt a little flat. The use of research materials and props from the films seemed mostly intended to bolster what was essentially a two-dimensional work.

In Pig Earth, Berger describes the role of storytelling in small communities as a collective practice. “The village’s portrait of itself was – apart from the physical achievements of their work – the only reflection of the meaning of their existence.” Despite making up such a large percentage of the global population, the lives of peasant farmers and agricultural workers have waned from public attention. Schiffers and Erdödi’s project reconnects with the self-documentation through art which has always been a central part of the peasant’s existence. Together they facilitate the rediscovery and documentation of the rural communities’ own culture both for its residents and a wider audience.

In Berger’s novel he acknowledges the existence of two stories unfolding simultaneously: that of the village where he is the narrator and that of the village as told by itself, in which he is just another character. The videos of Schiffers and Erdödi’s village plays capture a feeling of discovery, pride and celebration as villagers tell their own stories on stage while the artists recede into the wings. The success of the project was perhaps undermined by attempting to show it in a gallery setting and with such a heavy emphasis on the artists’ process.

Dominika Trapp’s work also explored folk customs in agricultural communities, particularly those of women. In her installation Lay Him Not Upon Me… she references Romanian ethnographer Olga Nagy’s Book of Women, one of the few accounts of the lives of rural women in Eastern Europe. Trapp constructs a totem of milking stools painted red. This totem, which looks like it might fall apart at any moment, is intended to reveal the burden of motherhood as described in Nagy’s book. It is topped with a larger stool which Trapp describes as representing the oppressive husband. Alongside this Trapp exhibits three copies of the book, a painting and a drawing. For the opening of the biennale Trapp organised a performance by the Lada Choir, a group of women wearing traditional dress and singing Hungarian folk songs who moved through the exhibition space, with the group Peasants in Atmosphere in accompaniment with the disorienting and distorted sounds of industrial noise music. The performance seemed like a perfect metaphor for the strange place culture finds itself in at present: suffering in equal parts from a dangerous nostalgia for notions of folk, which easily drift into ethno-nationalism, alongside – or perhaps as a result of – a total inability to make sense of the digital noise which seems to be engulfing all aspects of life.

As the performance spread through Grand Hall it brought with it a palpable feeling of crisis. In the midst of this a lone olive tree stood in the middle of the exhibition, dying. In a kind of inversion of Joseph Beuys’ 7000 Oaks, the century-old uprooted tree was wheeled into the gallery in a performance by Prague-based art collective stopgenocidevgaze. The collective, who had protested the opening of an exhibition of works from the Skopje Solidarity Collection at the museum three months prior, were formally invited to stage an intervention at the biennale’s opening ceremony in a show of solidarity with Palestinians. This happening was accompanied by readings from If I’m to die, let it be a story, a collection of texts about Palestine from Czech perspectives – its name taken from the lines of a poem written by Refaat Alareer, killed in Gaza by an Israeli airstrike in 2023. The action, designed to draw attention to the complicity of art organisations in the Gazan genocide, functioned as a kind of anti-social rather than social sculpture, revealing the failure of arts institutions to effect real-world change.

This was one example of a few works in the biennale which expanded outwards from its ostensible focus. A cluster of artists seemed to have focused specifically on the war in Ukraine and ideas of Russian imperialism. In his work Dream flags (Dolyna Sculptures) Ukranian artist Nikita Kadan presents a series of flags from metal sheeting from fencing, roofs or walls damaged during the war. These metal sheets are affixed to poles and accompanied by notes written by the artist upon waking from dreams. The sculptures themselves are heavily damaged and marked with what look like bullet holes. Their bent and broken forms give them the appearance of being real flags frozen mid-motion. When combined with Kadan’s accounts of his dreams since the beginning of the war they become not only a record of the destruction of the exterior world but also an account of the damaging and distorting effects of war on the psyche.

Similarly exploring the impact of war on the exterior and inner world, Kateryna Aliinyk exhibited three surreal landscape paintings of war-torn rural Donbas. These apocalyptic pastoral landscapes, which are in many ways indebted to Paul Nash’s post-war surrealism, are difficult to digest. They feel simultaneously abstract and real, raw. Trees weep blood-like sap, partially buried skulls protrude from the soil, stumps are split and splintered with teeth like something out of Little Shop of Horrors. This theatricality is furthered in one painting where a Lynchian red curtain hangs over the landscape.

Finally Kateryna Lysovenko, also based in Ukraine, paints objects from the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg in Russia. Presented on a semi-circular freestanding structure covered by canvas, Lysovenko’s work Archaeological artefacts stolen and brought to the Hermitage Museum during the Russian monarchy, the USSR and modern Russia, inviting a discussion on who owns the past, (2023–2024) questions the role of plunder in the formation of nationhood. The objects Lysovenko paints span the diverse cultures that once made up the Russian empire, later the USSR and finally contemporary Russia. The work suggests that Russia is a nation founded on colonial conquest; it also explores the complicated role of folk objects, intended to evoke historicity, in the formation of national identity.

These works seem to go further in revealing the impact of globalism on peasants and workers. Cultural identities become tangled and confused when used by governments or alliances of governments to pursue political goals, just as rural landscapes become maimed by military action. Peasant communities in rural Eastern Europe are displaced, dispossessed and even killed as a result of conflicts in which they have little say, while rural people – their customs, language, dress and the things they make – all become the unwilling components of stories about nationhood and identity. When war breaks out it is not the ruling classes who are expected to fight and die but workers and peasants.

That evening after leaving the biennale opening, I went to meet a friend for a drink in Letna Park. We met at the former site of a 17,000-tonne monument to Stalin built in 1955 and destroyed just seven years later during the process of de-Stalinisation, using 800 kilogrammes of explosives and 1650 detonators. After brief stints as a pirate radio station and rock club in the 1990s, it is now home to a small bar serving cheap beers. We sat on the edge of the wall where Stalin’s giant bust had once towered over the city, watching teenage interrailers crowd around a sound system playing dubstep and beyond them the lights of Prague’s Old Town. Looking at the city I was reminded of Josef Koudelka’s photograph of a passer-by’s wristwatch in Wenceslas Square in Prague in August 1968 taken at the exact moment Soviet troops invaded the city. We talked about how strange the world was becoming.

With a little time to spare before my flight home I returned to the biennale the next morning to attend a participatory performance held by artist collective björnsonova in their installation: a kind of sunken living room with carpeted floors and wooden seating, appliqué curtains and sculptural cushions. The workshop began by opening multiple decks of tarot cards. Participants were asked to remove a card from each deck. The cards were then placed face down on the carpet in the shape of a butterfly, before the artists opened a discussion in which participants were asked to decide upon a question which the selected tarot cards would be used to answer or understand. As we spoke the intention shifted slightly; instead of simply answering a question it was suggested this could be a kind of séance. The exhibition, the Trade Fair Palace, Holešovice, the city, perhaps the whole world was haunted by the spirits of earthbound peasants and workers; we would commune with them and through attempting to address their unresolved problems would ourselves learn how to overcome the challenges of late capitalism. As the performance progressed I became more and more lost. My complete lack of knowledge of tarot made it impossible to follow what was being uncovered. As I gathered my things ready to go to the airport I noticed the group taking a brief pause in the performance. I asked one of the members of björnsonova what was happening – what were the tarot cards revealing about our present state? She replied bluntly, “We’re all fucked”. .