Jury Statement 2026

The jury is thrilled to announce that the 2026 edition of the Jindřich Chalupecký Award received the highest number of applicants to date. The jury appreciated the breadth and variety of applications from all over the Czech Republic and abroad, with particularly strong participation from artists outside of Prague. Many applications offered unexpected perspectives on practices previously unknown to the jury in terms of the diversity of voices with various backgrounds and lived experiences as well as their depth, surprising experimentation with artistic media, and explorations of the possibilities of visual language. The proposals also included the innovative approaches of political and activist projects that brought together urgent concerns for environmental and social justice and responses to the ongoing tragedies of war.

At the same time, in response to this year’s applications, we would again encourage performance artists, collectives, and artists working with the moving image or innovative interdisciplinary experimentation with artistic media to apply next year. The final selection responds to the urgent questions of Czech contemporary art while remaining firmly in dialogue with international concerns and events.

We appreciate The Laundry Collective (Kolektiv Prádelna) long-term, continuous work with socially engaged issues, addressing the experience of exclusion, marginalization, and poverty with a unique and collective artistic voice. In their work with the moving image, we applaud their masterful reappropriation of the language of exclusion and reversal of power roles, coming from their specific positionality as people who have lived through the experiences of homelessness, disability, and racialization. Their participatory artistic practice builds spaces where friendship, intimacy, and care are enacted as an innovative form of artistic expression while testing the normative frameworks of contemporary art institutions. It shows us how to think about ways of belonging that go beyond the notion of conventional success and a traditional artistic career.
By using grassroots survival strategies, making art with minimal resources, and developing it through practices of (un)learning, their work highlights urgent questions of class and disadvantage. The Laundry Collective brings forward the experience of women who are hugely underrepresented in the Czech art scene but also in mainstream society. In this way, the collective challenges the privilege embedded in the contemporary art world but also art history in general.

Yuliya Bokhan’s work offers powerful insights into existential themes such as social uprootedness and anxiety, with universal relevance. At the same time, her pieces retain the charm of the unspoken—a sense of an individual way of seeing the world. Her work strikingly weaves together references from across the history of painting with a confident mastery of artistic and technological techniques.
Bokhan mesmerized us with the textures and volumes of tactile works that question the boundaries of the binarisms of self and others, inside and outside, communication and noise. The artist introduced us to what she calls the “deep charge” of various fluid interactions. Using cheap ballpoint pens or found objects and textiles, the artist creates rich, powerful, skillfully executed situations that refer to, among many other themes, the impossibility of meeting, human and nonhuman entanglements, and war and its traumas.

Tereza Kalousová’s practice inventively combines object-based work, architectural thinking, and video installation, through which she examines the transformations of embodiment, time, and space in an era of virtualization and distorting neoliberal infrastructures. The motif of deformation is central to her work—deformations of the body, of temporal perception, and of movement within a post-internet reality.
In both her filmic works and her sculptural settings, she excels at creating worlds where digital and analogue notions of the self converge, where they quite literally bend, and our bodily, temporal, and spatial sensibilities intertwine in an exquisite complicity.
Working in multiple media, Kalousová creates cinematic works, objects, and architectural situations that examine the new posthuman condition in neoliberal spaces. Using the visual language of this new state, she recreates the room so the audience can experience alienation, repetition, and dissociation.

The jury’s special mention goes to Stop Genocide in Gaza, whose application stood out with its political messaging in response to the silence of cultural institutions in the face of the genocide in Gaza.