Café Chalupecký: In-Between-Dialogues Ola Hassanain: The Watching Counsel

Saturday 13 June 2026 1:00 PM – 9:00 PM

Conception: Ola Hassanain
Participating artists: Pelumi Adejumo, Simnikiwe Buhlungu, Critical Tech Group, Tamara Kametani, Magdi Masaraa & JJJJJerome Ellis, Vojtěch Radakulan, Marie Tučková
Curator: simona markel dvorák
Dramaturgy cooperation: Tereza Jindrová
Organizational cooperation: Inka Jelínek Jurková (Goethe Institut), Eva Drexlerová (Galerie Rudolfinum)
Production: Zlata Borůvková, Ondřej Houšťava (SJCh), Jan Čejka, Natálie Rajnišová (Rudolfinum)
Graphic design: Štěpán Marko
Communication: Petra Švecová (SJCh)

With the kind support of Ministry of culture of the Czech Republic, City of Prague, Goethe-Institut Sudan, Goethe-Institut Czech Republic, Mondriaan Fund  and programme Culture Moves Europe.

“Thinking globally, what we really have is a poverty–hunger–habitat–energy–trade–population–atmosphere–waste–resource problem, none of whose separate parts can be solved on their own.” - Sylvia Wynter’s On Being Human as Praxis (2015), reflection on what it means to be human within cycles of catastrophe

The Watching Counsel addresses the notion of (un)habitability in relation to ecological, political instabilities and the fragmented realities of the present. It generates new forms of e care, participation and collective agency. Conceived and spatially designed by artist and architect Ola Hassanai, the project unfolds in dialogue with curator simona markel dvorák. Together, they foreground the intensifying interconnectedness of global events that increasingly destabilize and fragilize life at its deepest levels, calling for renewed awareness of the interdependence between places, bodies, species, politics, and climate. The project presents contributions by invited artists within a soundscape that permeates the great hall of the Rudolfinum in Prague. Ola Hassanain’s practice investigates how political, ecological, and historical systems become visible through built environments. Following this approach, The Watching Counsel creates a temporarily shared space punctuated by sound compositions, performances and reflections on a unified planetary body - from the changing color, texture and flow of river water to war-related displacement and ecological devastation. These catastrophes are linked to global struggles over land, gold, lithium, and other extractive resources.. The project also asks what material and social conditions these processes create for the future and what form of “ecology of repair” are we able to imagine today? 

Here, Hassanain develops a mode of attention anchored in witnessing / watching, in which understanding emerges not from data, but from presence, relationships and the ability to listen. The installation does not strive for unambiguous answers; rather, it opens a space for perceiving what often remains hidden, and for tracing connections between seemingly unrelated events that are understood here as deeply implicated.

The conceptual and visual core of the installation consist of clay islands with hibiscus, responding to the presence of water and light. They refer to the house of Ola Hassanain’s grandmother, built from clay, which first began to crack and eventually collapsed following disruptions to the irrigation system in Gezira that altered the local water regime. These materials thus connect personal experience with broader themes of infrastructure, environmental change and the climate crisis.

Watching and Counsel become forms of open-ended propositions for noticing, listening, and responding to what feels broken. It reflects on re-story-ation in which witnessing and watching became a gesture of care and attentiveness , to shared presence among human, land and all species.

About the dramaturgy of Café Chalupecký: In-Between-Dialogues

For more than ten years, the Jindřich Chalupecký Society has been organizing Café Chalupecký meetings, inviting mainly foreign curators, theorists, artists to get to know the Czech art scene and create their own interpretations in relation to Czech art of the present and the recent past. As part of the Dialogues at the Border cycle, in collaboration with curator Simona Markel Dvorák, the SJCh is expanding this series with activities that focus on critical thinking, reflection on current events and conditions in the world, and dialogue that is intergenerational, interdisciplinary, and translocal.

These meetings are developed in the spirit of Jindřich Chalupecký's legacy and understand art not only as a reflection of society, but as a space for intervention and responsibility. They are based on his commitment to translocal dialogue and the social dimensions of artistic practice, and develop his vision in the context of pressing issues of the present. Through Chalupecký’s extensive correspondence and his belief in collaborative exchange across borders and generations, we are reminded once again of the need to think across geographies, temporalities, and lived experience—an approach that resonates with intersectional feminist practice. New dialogues thus connect the historical conditions of his era with the fragmented realities of today, maintaining an open space in which critical reflection and collective imagination can meet.

The Watching Counsel is also part of the accompanying public program for the exhibition DATAS {The Data and the Sovereign}, an international art and research project that brings together artists, theorists, and technological experts to explore how digital infrastructures, artificial intelligence, and algorithmic governance affect personal and political sovereignty. DATAS explores the mechanisms of surveillance capitalism, technological extractivism, and the erosion of democratic agency.

In this context, we will be interested in: what communication tools, data technologies and energy infrastructures are used for civilian and military purposes, and who really benefits from these differences. We are also interested in how decisions on climate change, the transformation of the social justice and security landscape are presented – often unclearly, illegibly – and who are the real actors and interests that influence these decisions.