A Garden of Shifting Minds
June 19 – September 2, 2025
NOD Gallery, Dlouhá 33, Prague

Guests: Bernd Blossey (Cornell University), Yosef Brody, Rosetta S. Elkin (Pratt Institute), Jakub Kvízda (Charles University), Abigail Pérez Aguilera (The New School), Petr Pyšek (Czech Academy of Sciences), Melanie Rios, Harpreet Sareen (Parsons School of Design), Mark Spencer (Natural History Museum, London), Věra Vačkářová

A Garden of Shifting Minds presents works shaped by Adam Vackar’s long encounters with Giant Hogweed (Heracleum mantegazzianum), a plant listed as invasive and targeted by eradication programs across Europe and the United States. The “garden” refers to a real place: a semi-wild patch of land near an industrial factory and a power plant, a place that french gardener and thinker Gilles Clement calls third landscape. The place has become an open air studio for Vackar, here he repeatedly returns to film and photograph the towering plants. It is an overlooked terrain caught between infrastructure and abandonment, largely outside everyday human attention.

Vackar has developed a slow rhythm of returning, filming, and waiting. The process has little to do with collecting data. It is based on physical and spiritual presence. Each work in the exhibition records time spent with a species otherwise approached through the language of control, management, and eradication. Vackar asks a direct question: how might we relate to a nonhuman organism we barely understand, or that we deem dangerous? One possible answer is simple: to spend time with it, rather than cutting it apart and placing it under a microscope.

For the exhibition, Vackar coats life-size Hogweed plants in thin layers of copper. He does the same with a discarded cardboard box from an oversized flat-screen television. Both objects belong, ordinarily, to the world of waste, one as consumer packaging, the other as a biological threat scheduled for elimination. The copper plating places them inside the same sculptural language, binding industrial debris and botanical matter into a single material statement. Vackar shoots black-and-white analogue photographs in open-gate format, documenting his time with the plant in the landscape. He makes a film essay. He conducts interviews with scientists, botanists, landscape architects, psychologists, and healers, drawing the project outward into a broader, multivalent field of knowledge, one that cannot be contained by any single discipline, and does not try to be.