Karumi translates from Japanese as “lightness.” This aesthetic principle is closely tied to the tradition of haiku, particularly to the work of Macuo Bašó, whose white plotter texts drift through the exhibition like imagined water lilies floating on the surface of a lake. The exhibiting artists, who share not only a contemplative sensibility and expressive sensitivity but also common studios within the Studia PRÁM residency program, transpose this lightness into alternating minor and major tonalities. The Symbolist poet Karel Hlaváček described this delicate and sensitive, yet sweetly fractured state of mind as follows: “To capture all that is sublime, mysterious, anemic, and timid in delicate mystification, in irony, and in warm intimacy.”

This is not the heavy sorrow of Antonín Dvořák’s Largo, but rather the tender Andante of Frédéric Chopin, whose plaintive chromatic music unfolds as a quiet monologue and intimate confession. This scenographic lightness reflects the purity and moderation of the ancient ideals of Roman Stoicism (Pavel Kytner), the natural movement of Taoist flow, where soul and breath become one (Kateřina Šťastná), Buddhist non-attachment and letting things simply be, as echoed in Martin Heidegger’s concept of Gelassenheit (Monika Hniková), lightness amid weight as an affirmation of existence in Friedrich Nietzsche’s Zarathustra (Petr Dejmek), and the existential fragility of form, whose shores define identity and the inner truth of all things (Ekaterina Gordeladze). All of this unfolds with gentle ease, freed from ostentation and disruptive drama, embodying the principle of karumi.

Softness and muted tones construct a pathway of nostalgia leading from earthly physicality toward ethereal planes of spirit. Within the gallery, dematerialized specters of Plato’s forms encounter states suspended between time and space. Nostalgically abandoned architecture, liberated from the chaos of human presence, becomes fuller in its harmonious emptiness, resonating like sound within the body of a musical instrument. The resulting force dissolves the boundary between external reality and dreamlike landscapes, much like the verses of Macuo Bašó.

curator: Kamil Princ