Beyond Gallery Walls: Fotograf Zone Explores How We Live as Neighbors

“This year, we see the festival as a living organism that connects different experiences and ways of seeing the world. For us, Wild Kin is not simply the theme of the exhibitions. Art functions here more as a space for practicing understanding—whether that means exploring multispecies coexistence or looking for new ways of living together,”says Markéta Kinterová, Artistic Director of Fotograf Zone.

The festival’s main exhibition, Sousedé, by acclaimed German photographer Jochen Lempert, will be presented at Fotograf Zone Gallery. Trained as a biologist, Lempert has long worked with analog black-and-white photography, observing animals, plants, people, and the environments they inhabit together. His photographs capture subtle encounters and relationships that often go unnoticed in everyday life. At TYRŠ the human lab, works by Polina Davydenko, Oleksiy Radynski, Thérèse Anna Rafter, and Dominik Styk will be presented, while the public spaces of Holešovice Market will feature works by Anetta Mona Chisa and Lukáš Prokop. In this way, the festival moves beyond the traditional gallery space and brings contemporary art directly into the fabric of everyday urban life.

The festival program will also offer a range of ways to engage with its themes through the body, movement, conversation, and imagination. At the opening on October 1, Nela Kováč Britaňáková will present her performance Aleurone Grain, in which she brings ceramics together with spatial installations to explore relationships between the body, material, and space. During the closing evening, Azolla Collective will perform Asphalt Lovers, in which three hybrid beings navigate loneliness, frustration, and failure in an abandoned urban landscape while searching for forms of belonging and ways of inhabiting the world together.

A group bike ride through Prague will connect Holešovice Market with Fotograf Zone Gallery and conclude at the opening of Neighbors. During an apple harvest in the orchards of Troja Château, organized in collaboration with Prague City Gallery, visitors will be invited to gather apples together and reflect on seasonality, sharing, and our relationship to a specific place.

The theme of multispecies coexistence will also be explored through workshops. In Social Worlds of the River: What Does It Mean to Be a Neighbor to the Vltava?, Anna Mírková will use drawing, conversation, and imagination to invite participants to view the river as a living neighbor. Denisa Půbalová’s workshop and performance Playground for Soft Measures works with foam, dough, bubbles, and other mutable materials, using touch, smell, and taste to explore alternative ways of perceiving the relationship between the body and its environment.

The program will also include a series of lectures. In Nature in the City, or the City in Nature?, Radan Haluzík will address questions of urban nature and possible forms of the city of the future, while Gabriela Benish-Kalná, in her lecture The Anxiety of Multispecies Care, will explore agriculture, climate adaptation, and ecosystem care.

Šárka Zahálková’s audio walk The Exchange of Goods and Services will offer a different reading of Holešovice Market and the relationships among the human and nonhuman beings that inhabit it. The program will be complemented by author readings, DJ sets, and screenings. In collaboration with Elpida, the festival will also present Voices of Seniors, featuring a projection of photographs by participants in the Elpida Center’s photography course, followed by a discussion.

This year, Fotograf Zone Festival will connect a range of different environments: galleries, cultural institutions, public space, the urban landscape, and places we do not usually think of as exhibition venues. Wild Kin is an invitation to see the city, the landscape, other living organisms, and other people as parts of a shared environment.

Fotograf Zone Festival 2026
Wild Kin
October 1–11, 2026, Prague

Detailed program and information about individual events:

Festival.Fotograf.Zone