Herbarium
Solo exhibition at Kabinet T, Zlín, Czech Republic
Curated by Terezie Zemánková
Texts by Maja & Reuben Fowkes and Terezie Zemánková
September 8 – October 28, 2022

Plants have always been forced to play supporting roles in the human story: food, medicine, ornament, raw material, threat. Herbarium begins by refusing that hierarchy. At the center of the exhibition is Giant Hogweed (Heracleum mantegazzianum), a monumental plant imported to Europe from the Caucasus in the nineteenth century, first admired as an exotic curiosity, later condemned as an invasive enemy. Few species have travelled so quickly from fascination to moral panic.

Adam Vačkář follows this shift across film, sculpture, and speculative installation. His 2022 film Giant Hogweed moves between historical research, ecological discourse, and embodied encounter, tracing the plant’s migration through colonial collecting, ornamental gardens, riverbanks, legal regimes, and eradication campaigns. Hogweed appears here not only as a biological organism, but as a screen for fear, control, and fantasies of purity projected onto the landscape.

The exhibition extends this logic materially. Dried stems of Hogweed and other organic remains are pressed, electroplated, embedded in wax and resin, and reassembled into objects that resemble relics, lab specimens, devotional fragments, or archaeological remains from a future already underway. Their scale and strangeness unsettle the old distinction between natural form and cultural artifact.

Herbarium does not ask for the rehabilitation of one plant alone. It asks something larger: what kinds of life are welcomed, what kinds are expelled, and who gets to decide. Nature is not stable, innocent, or neatly ordered. It is restless, migratory, and full of difficult arrivals. Presented alongside visionary drawings by Josef Kotzian, Vačkář’s installation opens a space where botany, myth, and politics begin to contaminate one another.