After successful presentations in London and Paris, the international exhibition project Pixels and Poetics: Sudek, Funke and the Influence of New Technologies on the Development of Photography will also be presented to the Czech audience. The exhibition will be on display at the Goethe-Institut in Prague until 14 August 2026.

The large-scale project of the Czech Centres was created with the support of the PPF Foundation on the occasion of the anniversaries of two fundamental figures of Czech photography – Josef Sudek and Jaromír Funke. The exhibition connects their work with the works of contemporary artists working with digital technologies, generative tools and artificial intelligence, and opens up current questions of trust in the image, manipulation of reality and the transformation of photography as a medium.

Pixels and Poetics is based on the belief that photography has never been an objective imprint of reality. Each image is the result of a choice – of composition, light, time and authorial gesture. However, in the age of artificial intelligence, the very foundations of the photographic medium are changing: increasingly, images are being created that are not a record of reality, but a synthesis of data and algorithms.

The project has been prepared by Johana Rittmeyer, curator and dramaturge of the Czech Centres, who has also invited prominent personalities of the contemporary Czech visual scene into a dialogue with the works of Josef Sudek and Jaromír Funke. This is represented in the exhibition by the multimedia artists Barbora Trnková, Lenka Hámošová and the artist duo performing under the symbol & – Barbora Trnková and Tomáš Javůrek. The architecture of the exhibition was designed by Studio O plus M, the graphic identity was created by Markéta Hanzalová from COLMO studio. 

The Prague launch builds on the successful international presentations of the project and confirms the ambition of the Czech Centres to present Czech culture in an international context and at the same time to bring important projects back to the domestic audience. After Prague, the exhibition will continue to Belgrade (September 1-30, 2026), where it will be complemented by workshops on classical photography focusing on the darkroom, contact copy and analogue image manipulation, and then to New York (November 5, 2026-January 15, 2027), where the entire international project will conclude with a final presentation expanding on contemporary visual theory and new media forms.