Is landscape architecture an art field?

Is landscape architecture an art field?

Absolutely yes. This fact confirms the success of four students from the Department of Landscape Architecture at the Faculty of Agrobiology, Food and Natural Resources of the Czech University of Life Sciences, who, together with two other projects, were evaluated as the best in the international exhibition of young art POKOJE 2025. Eliška Sykorská, Dominika Žigmundová, Lucie Kocnová, and Veronika Šámalová created a great project, NE – MOC for this exhibition of students from art universities.

Young artists have filled more than 30 rooms of an abandoned house at Na Poříčí 1758/14 with their original site-specific installations on the theme of power in all its forms. You can see them until Sunday, November 23.

The evaluation of the works was carried out by a committee consisting of Tereza Jindrová, an art historian and curator who has long been dedicated to contemporary art and its institutional background, and has been the director of the Jindřich Chalupecký Society since 2025. Roman Štětina, a visual artist and teacher working at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. And Noemi Purkrábková, a theorist, critic, and curator who works at the intersection of contemporary art, media, and music. She works as a teacher at FAMU and is also the editor of the magazine Art Antiques, as well as a member of the experimental curatorial platform Proto Gallery Systems.

What if an event comes into your life that, to some extent, deprives you of the power to live your life as you would imagine? Illness is perhaps the only thing whose origin and course no being in the world can fully influence. And when illness comes, power leaves. In this room, we want to get closer to people suffering from chronic illness that affects their daily lives and decision-making. Fighting illness and trying to lead an everyday life in a society set on constant performance and productivity can often be incompatible. Listen to audio recordings of the stories of our heroes – friends who are struggling with some form of chronic illness, and let yourself be surrounded by a calm atmosphere of gentleness, fragility, healing, and hope, knowing that every pain will eventually subside and that every condition will ultimately improve.

ROOMS is a unique exhibition of young art that connects students from Czech and international art universities, creating a space for international cooperation. Each studio or student collective obtains one room in an empty building in the center of Prague, which they transform into their own site-specific installation. This format allows not only experimentation with exhibition approaches outside the traditional gallery framework, but also the confrontation of various artistic disciplines and methods of working with space. ROOMS thus function as a platform for exploring the possibilities of contemporary artistic creation and as a place for dialogue between the emerging generation of artists.

The theme of power, which frames this year's exhibition Rooms, might seem traditional and often elaborated. However, the approach of the young emerging artists is unconventional – it is neither normative nor unambiguous. Their installations convey vulnerability, pressure, and doubt, yet they approach the topic sensitively, often intuitively and abstractly. They do not simply try to determine who has power and who does not. Instead, they ask how it manifests itself, how we perceive it, and how it transforms in ordinary interpersonal situations and in broader social structures.

https://www.prehlidkapokoje.cz