Festival m³  / Art in Space has long served as a laboratory for public space. Its artistic council, composed of experts representing institutions such as the Prague City Gallery, the Prague Institute of Planning and Development, and the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design, selects curators for each edition who bring distinct approaches and methods of working with public space. The current edition, prepared by the curatorial duo Tomáš Moravec and Šárka Zahálková, will culminate this summer with a presentation of art installations and performative events.

Artists will bring their works into the public spaces of Prague 7 and Prague 8. In line with its motto—The Verticality of Places – focuses on several developing, closely related locations situated along an imaginary line, where the construction site at the AC Sparta stadium is one endpoint and the skeleton of the Nová Palmovka building is the other, with the Bubny neighborhood serving as the link between them. Through their creative practice, the participating collective of artists and curators has focused on exploring this territory in relation to themes of power structures and the politics of things and events, values, or time. 

In her upcoming sculptural intervention, artist Mia Milgrom focuses on the ground beneath our daily journeys. She explores themes of instability, imbalance, the degradation of relationships between various factors, and ways of visualizing plans within the context of the urban landscape. The artist is interested in what seeps through from the underlying layers, or what becomes part of the new layers upon which we are currently building.

Artur Magrot’s large-scale sculptural installation explores the themes of uncertainty and imbalance even further. He contrasts them with the fundamental human needs for shelter and safety, both in the sense of the individual and in broader geopolitical contexts. The artist’s kinetic installation visually resembles an inappropriately enlarged table, in the space beneath which we can, like immature children, at least illusorily hide from some of the risks of the contemporary world.

Rudolf Samohejl’s multi-layered project , straddling physical and virtual space, addresses issues of development related to the construction, operation, and value of data centers and their contents. Spanning both physical and virtual realms, it creates a speculative narrative of one possible future along the festival’s trajectory. In doing so, it unfolds a story of exploitation and manipulation tied to the value of information, data, and their ownership.

The Austrian artist duo zweintopf playfully presents a vision of alternative futures for the skeleton of the Nová Palmovka building. In their text-based spatial installation, Eva and Gerhard Pichler reflect on possible systemic transformations through new ways of naming the site. Despite the current physical exclusion of the public from certain locations, these places must continue to be regarded as an active part of public space, and their potential must be considered.

Performative events for the festival are being prepared by Alena Kotzmannová and Martin Zetová, as well as the Austrian art collective Faxen. 

Martin Zetová focuses in his work on the theme of suspected resources and their search through professional prospecting—work that is associated with great responsibility as well as potential mistrust. It thus has much in common with an artistic practice in which the artist explores polarity and probes the boundaries between the beneficial and the dangerous. Together with the dowsers invited to participate, they will focus on and explore, along the festival’s trajectory, what we need but cannot see.

Alena Kotzmannová touches on themes of collaboration, mutual aid, and horizontality with her artistic act connecting the banks of the Vltava. The motif of the boat as a means of communication appears repeatedly in the artist’s work, as do the possibilities and ways of reaching distant horizons. In a one-time performative situation following the festival’s opening, she will convey a message about the possibilities of human solidarity in moments of disrupted infrastructural connections.

The Austrian collective Faxen consists of Clemens Mairhofer, Lucas Norer, and Sebastian Six. Together, they work with sound and acoustics in space. For the festival, in collaboration with Lukáš Prchal’s Mikrochor choir, they are creating a series of live performances of the Shepard scale—an auditory illusion of continuously rising tones. Their work reflects the concepts of linearity and infinite growth, along with the curse that such growth may imply.

In addition to the aforementioned art projects arising from artistic research into specific locations and designated themes, the festival will also offer an accompanying program. The purpose of the m³ Festival / Art in Space is to raise questions regarding Prague’s public space, to open and expand the discussion and imagination about what surrounds us, what we are a part of, and what possible futures we can shape together.

www.festivalm3.cz