Mar 2024

This residency is realised in collaboration with Prague Art Week.

HART announces an International Artist Exchange with Lenka Bakes, in collaboration with Prague Art Week. Bakes will present an Open Studio during her residency at HART Haus, showcasing work inspired by her research in Hong Kong. Exploring the connection between self and human history, Bakes combines spiritual archeology, myth, and the city's memory to reflect on our reality. She uses photographs, literary snippets, artifacts, and natural objects to dissect and reconstruct this intertwined reality.

Lenka Bakes (b.1990) is an artist, curator, and director of the art festival Prague Art Week, who is well recognised in the contemporary art scene in the Czech Republic and Europe. She obtained a master’s degree from the Faculty of Art and Design at Jan Evangelista Purkyně University, where she studied in the Studio of Photography and Intermedia headed by Professor Pavel Baňka. She has exhibited in progressive galleries such as Like A Little Disaster in Italy, Below Grand Gallery in New York, and MeetFactory and Kvalitář in Prague. Her work was presented in the collective exhibitions Co-existence /symbiosis/ in Brussels and Symbiosis 2.0 in Hong Kong in spring 2023 as the VIP programme of Art Basel Hong Kong. She is represented by the Prague gallery Berlinskej Model, and her works are featured in the PPF ART Collection. As a writer, she is a regular contributor of Czech and international media such as VOGUE, ELLE, and Forbes, and she has managed several major international cultural events.

In her spiritually archaeological work, Lenka Bakes analyses the layers that surround us in the material and immaterial world. Her work is formally based on the medium of photography, which she layers, bends, and deconstructs to achieve a multiplicity of perspectives. In terms of content, she constructs a perspective in her images that contains both internal and external reflections of reality. Her series of collages Adaptus, depicting inter-animal mutations, was created as part of her work with the artist group DUNA (2016–2022). Her series of three self-portraits, also titled Adaptus (2017–2023), in which she explores the permeability of the body and conscious epigenetics, is influenced by transcendental experiences during compassionate meditations. In her most recent series, Adaptus Archeology, Bakes confronts the dimensions of our self-reflection against a backdrop of myth, history, space, and the tangible memory of the city. These insights are inspired by her observations in cosmopolitan cities such as Hong Kong, Naples, and New York.

About the Prague Art Week

PRAGUE ART WEEK is an open platform for the cooperation of the most important institutions in Prague’s art scene, as well as an annual art festival with the aim of connecting galleries, museums, exhibition halls, as well as art collections and other art-oriented organisations. The vision of PRAGUE ART WEEK is to make Prague stand out on the art world map and contribute to the internationalisation of the Czech art scene. The third edition of the art festival called PRAGUE ART WEEK 24 will present the best of the programme of Prague’s leading art institutions from 5-8 September 2024.