We invite you to the second edition of the international Performance Festival Pragicomedionale 2026, taking place September 11–12 at Pragovka. This year’s theme is Mutual Benefits.
FESTIVAL PROGRAMME / September 11, 2026
6:00 p.m. Obelisco Production
Bewood + Trips
Bewood is a performance in which we stand on the earth and in the soil as if we were trees, as if we were a forest. It involves attempting to carry out chlorophyll-based photosynthesis, to produce oxygen, and to do something good for the world.
Trips is a performance in which we carry trees on our shoulders and bodies, in complete harmony and connection, to show what we do, how we act, and who we are.
Bringing trees to Prague is a wonderful opportunity.
(4 hours, Pragovka Gallery and other locations in Prague)
FESTIVAL PROGRAMME / September 12, 2026
11:30 a.m. Zsuzsanna G. Szabó & Edit Rajcsányi
Connected: The Codes of Radical Kindness
What if kindness could be made visible?
The Codes of Radical Kindness is a participatory performance staged inside Pragovka Gallery. We operate two flatbed knitting machines placed at opposite ends of the hall. Throughout the day, we observe the room, and every time we witness an act of gentleness between visitors—a glance, a gesture, a moment of shared attention—we encode it into the growing textile using a pre-established system of knitting patterns.
The gallery hall is a living social space. Visitors move about, pause, and interact with one another; the performance draws on and reflects the relational energy of the gallery hall. At a specific time during the day, the audience is invited to participate directly. Anyone who wants may knit a few rows into the work. When a participant’s hands join the fabric, the knitted textile changes, marking the entry of another subjectivity into the structure. Individuality is not dissolved by collectivity; rather, it is made visible within it.
This performance does not sentimentalize kindness, nor does it treat it as a given. It approaches kindness as a practice—one that, as Erich Fromm reminds us, “requires humility, courage, faith, and discipline.” Like knitting itself, it demands repetition, attention, and presence.
(10 hours, Pragovka Gallery)
11:30 Maquis
In 500 Million of Years
Maquis (b. 1999), a performer, continues to wash her hands in a glass bowl with a liquid made from pink salt. She recites and then repeats a poem about the passage of time and the healing process while interweaving the poetry with improvised speeches. During the performance, a 65-kg block of ice is placed beside her, melting, representing the process of grief and the shifting nature of memory.
(4 hours, Pragovka, Permanent Beer Fest)
12:00 p.m. Kača Olivová
Selkie na výletě (Selkies on a Trip)
Selkies are mythological creatures, seal-like mermaids which exist in the liminal space between the sea and the land. Wild, free, mysterious.
The seal fairy Selkie has arrived at Pragovka! This Selkie still retains some of seal’s nature—it is playful, cheerful, and does not let itself be bound by conventions or expectations. She frolics and teases a bit, sharing her joy and freedom. Maybe it will tell us its story; perhaps even become human for a moment. Is it dangerous? Wait and see.
(30 minutes, MaxSpace)
1:00 p.m. Viktor Fuček
AI spoločné uvažovanie bude (AI Collective Consciousness Will Exist)
The performative project “AI spoločné uvažovanie bude” (AI Collective Consciousness Will Exist) creates a live situation in which an artificial intelligence algorithm intertwines with intuition and collective intelligence with the singularity of the body. The resulting form remains open, unpredictable, and shared. The project opens up space for collective reflecting on the relationship between the human body and non-human intelligence, and on what emerges when decision-making, imagination, and movement occur in collaboration with an algorithm. It is a reflection on the posthuman condition and possible forms of the future, in which the boundaries between human and machine intelligence are becoming increasingly permeable.
(1 hour, Pragovka Events)
1:30 p.m. Nina Sibinská
Hands On Image
Hands On Image is a 3-hour visual performance in which the image breaks free from music and becomes an autonomous medium. The performance serves as a critical commentary on contemporary VJ practice. A continuous live set emerges in silence, based exclusively on visual perception.
Nina Sibinská manipulates her own visual materials in real time using Resolume Arena software. She gives freedom to the live, organic image which transforms unpredictably.
The project’s theme addresses the crisis of attention and lack of focus in today’s fast-paced world.
The project explores the deconstruction of the image; it operates without music, without AI samples, and without external sources, emphasizing human presence, concentration, and endurance. The project is based on the 24-hour performance 24H: hands on image, which took place on April 5–6, 2026 at ARCHA+.
(Pragovka MaxSpace, 3 hours)
2:00 p.m. eri mrtva
odskočit si (take a leak)
The performance odskočit si (take a leak) is actually focused on peeing. It is about how a three-minute experience can be something completely different in a world marked by unequal access or the need for assistance. In addition to opening a bathroom stall, the performance also raises questions about the position of people with disabilities who stand or sit on the border between the able-bodied and disabled worlds.
eri mrtva (he/him) explores themes of power inequalities, bodies in spaces and institutions, and (in)visibility. He is interested in topics such as disability, queering, work culture, interconnectedness, and collective responsibility. In his practice, he blends art, activism, and writing.
(Pragovka Events, 15 minutes)
2:30 p.m. Aiman Hassani
Paper Cuts: Mutual Tongues
Paper Cuts: Mutual Tongues is a durational performance set in a darkened gallery room lit only by ultraviolet light. The performer sits at an administrative desk filling out oversized institutional forms with UV-reactive markers which glow brightly under black light while remaining invisible in normal light. What is written emerges like bureaucratic secrets, visible only in the dark. Sound builds through layered loops of breath and whispers of institutional language. The audience enters this silent bureaucratic space as witnesses to the slow, obsessive process of marking, cutting, and rearranging text. Immigration letters, municipal forms, and asylum procedures are physically dismantled on the desk, with fragments exchanged and reordered into new meanings. Scissors, paper, glue. Nothing is archived. The paper remnants are swept up at the end. The only record is what the audience carries in their bodies.
(Pragovka Gallery Atelie, 1 hour)
4:00 p.m. Anastasija Pavić
I Can Move Mountains
I Can Move Mountains pairs live screen recordings of mountain images undergoing digital manipulation with the mechanism producing it—the artist pressing her lips and tongue against a phone screen, reshaping the landscape using the “Liquify” tool in FaceTune. The work takes the phrase “I would move mountains for you”—a declaration of male devotion within heterosexual courtship narratives—and transforms it from a promise made to a woman into a claim made by a woman. Where the savior archetype has long structured desire around male action and female passivity, the piece relocates agency to a body which this language has denied the capacity to act. The mountains stand in for the scale of emotional labor expected of women—work remaining largely invisible and rarely counting as action in the cultural imagination.
(Pragovka Gallery, 20 minutes)
4:30 p.m. Antonín Brinda
Normální performance (Normal Performance)
A normal performance for (ab)normal times.
A performance so normal that it is not normal.
No story, no theme, no costume—everything is normal.
(outdoor area in front of Pragovka Gallery, 1–3 hours)
5:00 p.m. Catherine Radosa
Revoluce zlatého hnoje – myšlenky z trůnu (The Golden Manure Revolution—Thoughts from the Throne)
The performance “Revoluce zlatého hnoje – myšlenky z trůnu” (The Golden Manure Revolution—Thoughts from the Throne) is an imaginary journey from toilets to sewers (to the “city’s bowels,” in the words of Victor Hugo) and into the watershed, and further through fragments of research, gradually transforming into a utopian story. It embodies a narrative exploring the connections between intimate banality and the ecological cycle of water and nutrients of which we are a part of. From the vantage point of the “throne,” or Rodin’s “Thinker,” I share a topic that is not spoken of and images that are not looked at. The unwanted, the distasteful, and the intimate intertwine with the layers of the Anthropocene and the possibilities of the future.
(Pragovka Events, 30 minutes)
6:00 PM Darina Alster
Rhizomatico
Through the Rhizomatico project, I apply the concept of the rhizome—defined philosophically as a form of nonlinear thinking (A Thousand Plateaus by Deleuze and Guattari)—to a way of surviving in today’s world, which demands of us to absorb vast amounts of scandalous and even shocking information, in a society where values are largely shifting toward conservatism, and in a world gradually closing in on itself and moving ever closer to various types of catastrophes. In a way, we hope we will survive—a feeling rooted in the instinct for self-preservation. In the cultural sphere, it is not entirely easy to avoid falling into despair; in any case, despair is a paralyzing state that is highly impractical, even in times of crisis. This is why I pay close attention to a way of perceiving which looks into the unnamed space beyond binary. This way of perceiving brings me back to the present where I discover that the power of transformation lies in the gaps between words. By “transformative power,” I mean the gradual transformation of anxiety into hope—the hope that emotions can be viewed as a process. The hope that our journey, even if it does not seem like it, is leading somewhere. That in the midst of nothingness, a sprout or rhizome will reappear, just as the first green leaves begin to sprout from the black earth after winter.
(Pragovka, various locations, 45 minutes)
7:00 p.m. David Helán & Miloš Šejn
Multiaverso
Helán will present a language-conscious presentation for a single “perfoprofessor,” in which Šejn will be made aware of the importance of literary processes in the intelleclectical sphere and their material-value exchange—as a semi-finished form of Miloš’s quick-witted rebuttal to the trivialization of the world through stylistically hollow content.
Miloš Šejn is prepared to return Helán’s blow with a nonsensified, unannounced, yet firmly theoretically grounded position that would successfully build upon the ongoing creative catharsis, culminating in the potential for the final dissolution of the lingering remnants of their collaboration.
A point of consensus for the co-collaboration will be established, from which the semi-duo will, above all, persistently harm up one another, as the mature state of mutual reflection between the artists now demands an advanced degree of emotional harm to the viewer, intended to be inflicted in a persistent, long-term manner.
(Pragovka MaxSPace, 90 minutes)
8:30 PM Lena Valentina Hauth & Jovana Petrovska
Realidead
Is reality an illusion, or is the illusion a reality? Is a system real only as long as everyone believes in it? At a time when borders are being dissolved or created, two individuals meet and their realities begin to waver.
Concept, Choreography, Performance & Costumes: Lena Valentina Hauth
Co-creation & Performance: Jovana Petrovska
Music: Marius Houschyar
(Pragovka Events, 30 minutes)
9:30 p.m.
Short Film Series
(Pragovka Maxspace, 1 hour)
The project is implemented with the financial support of the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, the Municipality of Prague 9 and Nadace Život umělce.
