Adam Vackar    News    Projects    Texts    Contact    





EXHIBITION
Prague Art Week
 Savarin Palace
Prague, Czech RepublicAliens
Sept 5 - 9, 2024Prague Art Week





As part of the exhibition project, I introduced specimens of Giant Hogweed into a public setting, their surfaces coated in copper. This material transformation lends the plants an ornamental, almost precious quality—visually seducing while simultaneously enacting a symbolic gesture of protection against the stigma typically attached to so-called invasive species. Placed within the opulent grounds of a renovated Baroque palace—repurposed by a real estate developer leveraging contemporary art for media presence and social capital—the gesture unfolds as a deliberate paradox: a species habitually vilified and eradicated is here elevated, aestheticized, and offered up for admiration.

The intervention probes questions of representation, inclusion, and shifting systems of value within visual and environmental culture. It asks how entities marked as undesirable can be reimagined, and how institutional, aesthetic, or economic frameworks shape our sense of what is worthy of care, visibility, or protection. In doing so, the project reveals not only the power structures embedded in our relationship to nature and landscape, but also the double-edged role of art itself—as a potential tool of symbolic violence and, conversely, as a site for reconsideration, empathy, and transformation.