The exhibition Occult Couture presents a current collection of objects in which, through the tension between the body, materiality, and costume, the artist explores the processes that shape identity even before they acquire an image, a language, or a fixed name.

Romana Drda de Angelis is one of the most prominent artists on the contemporary Czech visual arts scene. She is known for her clean, often almost transparent aesthetic, her work with light, matter, and emptiness, and her sensitive interweaving of objects, installations, fashion, technology, and design.

The project Occult Couture employs the concept of the “hidden” (Latin occultus) as a term for processes that fundamentally shape the body and identity, while “couture” serves as a means for the artist to give these hidden movements a material form. The objects—corsets—thus do not function as representations of identity, but as its material configurations: they capture moments of transition in which bodily and psychological structures are rearranged, and they reveal identity as an unstable form emerging in the course of transformation.

Romana Drda de Angelis (*1987) is a visual artist living in Prague. Her work has long focused on the body and identity. She is interested in how personal experience and inner transformation can manifest in the physical form of the body, clothing, or an object. Her practice spans sculpture, installation, and work with costume. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, the HfG Karlsruhe, and the Korean National University of Arts in Seoul. In 2026, she completed her doctoral research, Internal and External Identity, at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Brno University of Technology. Her work has been exhibited at venues including the National Gallery in Prague, MeetFactory, Villa Empain in Brussels, the Czech Center in Berlin, Marignana Arte in Venice, kim? Contemporary Art Centre in Riga, and BOZAR in Brussels. She has completed residencies and research stays at Art in General in New York, Current Plans in Hong Kong, AIR Antwerpen, the Gyeongju Biennale Residency in South Korea, and Keiko Udaka Studio in Kyoto. She was a finalist for the Jindřich Chalupecký Award and a recipient of the National Gallery in Prague’s Empathy Award.

Curator: Pavel Kubesa