The Fantom project is revitalizing the site of the original, now-defunct studio of Josef Sudek, a modest wooden structure hidden behind a garden wall in Prague’s Újezd district, both as a physical ruin and a metaphysical state. The project has been prepared to mark the 50th anniversary of Sudek’s death (September 15, 1976).

“This house burned down. It exists only because I keep looking at it.”

Fantom, 2026

Phantom, a new site-specific installation by visual artist Hynek Alt, will open at the Josef Sudek Studio in Prague on September 11, 2026. The project was created to mark the 50th anniversary of Josef Sudek’s death and returns to the site of the photographer’s work—a modest wooden structure hidden behind a garden wall in Prague’s Újezd neighborhood. The original building burned down and was demolished; the building that stands on the site today and houses the gallery is a faithful replica of it. Fantom returns to the moment just before this demolition, to the ruin at the moment of its demise, and reconstructs it as both a physical structure and a metaphysical state.

The central element of the exhibition is a video created within a digital reconstruction of the studio. The space was modeled from surviving photographs of the burned-down building using a combination of photogrammetry, manual modeling, and texturing. As a result, the film exhibits an unsettling closeness to the images from which it derives: we see the same shelves, fallen beams, and crumpled papers, but this time rotated in space and viewed from angles that no camera has ever captured. The result is a space composed exclusively of documentary traces of its own destruction. It is precisely in the shift between the photograph and its digital counterpart—familiar yet alien, indexical yet synthetic—that the entire work unfolds.

A single fluid, uninterrupted shot sweeps through the space. The camera’s path was not animated by hand but generated algorithmically. Throughout the film, the camera gradually inhabits a series of different bodies, none of which are ever seen. It suddenly stops, accelerates, and changes both height and position, thereby obscuring whose perspective it actually conveys: that of an animal, a machine, a voyeur, or a spirit. It moves through the studio in the same way that memory moves through a place that no longer exists—patiently and without a body.

In addition to the video, the exhibition presents new photographic work that builds on Sudek’s portraits of veiled figures. The starting point is the male figure from the stone sculpture Lovers (1961) by Eva Krsková, which still stands today in Prague’s Stromovka Park, a place Sudek photographed throughout his life. Here, the veiled figure does not appear merely as a subject, but as a witness: it simultaneously watches over what the fabric conceals. Conceived as a three-dimensional object rather than a flat photograph, the image reveals itself only partially, keeping the rest to itself. The veil, alluding to a leitmotif in Sudek’s work, becomes a threshold between the subject and the apparition—and, on the anniversary of the photographer’s death, a mourning veil as well. Veiling thus becomes the very condition of any apparition.

Phantom moves at the intersection of archaeology and simulation, between the indexical trace of analog photography and the spectral logic of the 3D image. Building on Jacques Derrida’s Marx’s Specters and David Claerbout’s concept of the “synthetic image,” the project asks what remains when an image ceases to be a testimony. It does not treat the past nostalgically, but approaches it as an active, living layer that shapes our perspective, and explores how ghostliness persists as a structural condition of perception itself.

Curator: Tomáš Dvořák