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 a body of work by Adam Vačkář emerging from long-term field research with Giant Hogweed (Heracleum mantegazzianum), a plant widely classified as invasive. The “garden” refers to a real place: a semi-wild refuge near an industrial factory where the artist repeatedly returns to film and photograph the plant. In this overlooked landscape, outside constant human attention, Vackar develops a slow, intuitive research process grounded in direct encounters with living systems. Each work in the exhibition can be understood as a record of these encounters: a moment of relation between the artist and this controversial species.

The exhibition combines analogue photography, sculpture, copper plating, and an art-documentary film. Fragile organic forms are transformed through manual copper plating: life-size Giant Hogweed plants are coated with thin layers of copper, while a discarded cardboard box from a large-screen television undergo the same process. Both the cardboard and the plant are typically designated as waste: one as packaging from consumer culture, the other as a biological threat targeted for eradication. Yet within another perspective and another ontology, they can appear differently, not a disposable matter, but as symbilic resiliant heroes of our time. Copper plating brings these materials into a shared sculptural language, revealing unexpected connections between industrial systems and ecological processes. Alongside the sculptural works, the exhibition includes a film and interviews with scientists, botanists, landscape architects, psychologists, and healers, forming a multi-perspective reflection on how knowledge about nature is produced and interpreted.