The group exhibition Soft Borders represents a meeting of four artistic approaches, united by a concentrated work with material and a long-term, almost meditative process of creation. Karíma Al-Mukhtarová, Matěj Hrbek, Martin Pondělíček and Barbora Vovsová are part of a generation of artists who graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague between 2017 and 2021. Although each of them works with a different medium and subject matter, their work is united by a sensitivity to material processes and an emphasis on slowness, repetition and concentrated manual labour.

The title of the exhibition refers to boundaries that are neither fixed nor definitive. In the works presented, the relationships between the natural and the cultural, the organic and the artificial, or the personal and the collective are shown to be fluid and permeable. Here, the material is not just a means of expression, but an active partner in the process of creation. It shapes the form of the work as much as the gesture of the artist. In the spirit of Karen Barad's thinking, these works can be understood as situations in which meanings are born out of relationships between bodies, materials and processes. The artwork thus becomes a meeting place where new structures are gradually formed and where boundaries are constantly shifting, softening and re-emerging.

Matěj Hrbek works primarily with drawing in his work, whose apparent simplicity and immediacy are the result of a long search for a reduced visual language. As art historian Adam Hnojil points out, this apparent naivety is not a stylization, but rather a purposeful shedding of mannerisms and a return to the elementary pictorial logic of drawing. Hrbek's works oscillate between the ephemerality of drawing and the character of a relic - as if they were fragments of a pictorial system reminiscent of old illuminations or alchemical illustrations. At the same time, the motifs of hidden orders and cyclicality are disturbed by the author's subtle, sometimes even absurd humour.

Martin Pondělíček works mainly with textile techniques that require long-term, concentrated and repetitive work. Recently, he has been intensively engaged in embroidery, which does not create its own structure, but repeatedly goes through it and gradually transforms it. In her material choices she follows the hydrofeminist thesis of the theorist Astrid Neimanis, "We are all bodies of water." For example, she works with glass beads created from the sand of marine sediments, mother-of-pearl imported from the Indian Ocean in the last century, and carp scales, which she uses to create her own sequins. She connects these materials in a kind of "water bond" where different layers of time and geography meet. The central motif of his work is the hands and their gestures, which appear in the form of tiny haptic tapestries, referring to touch as a fundamental way of knowing the world.

Barbora Vovsová in her work explores structures of matter, growth and architecture that straddle the natural and geometric orders. Her sculptural works are often created by assembling small modular elements into complex forms reminiscent of crystalline formations, organic structures or imaginary architectures. She works with materials such as wax, wood and concrete, with concrete cast microstructures sometimes taking on an almost fossil-like quality. As curator Iva Mladičová points out in her text, the artist's works are based on observations of the processes of growth and layering of matter, in which geometric structuring is combined with the organic dynamics of natural forms.

Karima Al-Mukhtarová presents part of her artistic research Sweet & Sour, which explores the tomato as a botanical and cultural phenomenon. The author draws on personal experience and the context of Iraqi cultural memory, where the tomato is not only an important agricultural crop, but also a symbol of continuity in times of war and political rupture. In the exhibition, she will present the first part of a series that thematizes colonial spoils and historical crop movements. In parallel, she is exhibiting a series of self-portraits that materialize her own search and process of experimental breeding of the symbolic Czech-Irish tomato. Here, breeding is not just a biological act, but a method of thinking about identity, hybridity and cultural transmission. Other work focuses on the process of growth itself - on the transformation that is constantly taking place, even though we often do not perceive it.

The works presented here are linked not only by an emphasis on material and process, but also by a way of thinking about the world as a system of relationships that are neither stable nor definitive. In this way, Soft Borders opens up a space for seeing boundaries not as fixed lines, but as shifting zones where meanings are constantly being shaped, shifted and renegotiated.