Lamija Čehajić

My practice attends to how language, labour, gesture, and material processes accumulate into structures of knowledge within the ecological and economic conditions we inhabit. Drawing on feminist and diasporic frameworks, I consider displacement, belonging, and maintenance as sites of tension and negotiation. I work through the concept of the oikos as a shared, mythopoetic ground in which regimes of visibility and value are shaped and contested.
I approach making as slow labour aligned with degrowth, often returning to analogue processes, iterative gestures, and material resistance as ways of sensing what exceeds legibility or measure.

*1997
Prague

BIO
CONTACT

graph TD

A[Language] --> K[Structures of Knowledge]

B[Labour] --> K

C[Gesture] --> K

D[Material Processes] --> K

K --> E[Ecological Conditions]

K --> F[Economic Conditions]

G[Feminist Frameworks] --> H[Displacement]

G --> J[Maintenance]

I[Diasporic Frameworks] --> L[Belonging]

I --> H

H --> M[Technology]

L --> M

J --> M

M --> N[Regimes of Visibility]

M --> O[Regimes of Value]

P[Slow Labour] --> Q[Degrowth]

R[Analogue Processes] --> P

S[Iterative Gestures] --> P

T[Material Resistance] --> P

R --> U[Sensing Beyond Legibility]

S --> U

T --> U

U --> V[Legibility]

U --> W[Measure]

𝒽𝑒𝓁𝓁𝑜.
‿‿‿‿ ‿‿‿‿ ‿‿‿‿ ‿‿‿‿ ‿‿‿‿ 𝓈𝑒𝓁𝑒𝒸𝓉𝑒𝒹 𝓌𝑜𝓇𝓀𝓈 & 𝒶𝒸𝓉𝒾𝓋𝒾𝓉𝒾𝑒𝓈

𝓉𝒽𝑒 𝑜𝓇𝒶𝒸𝓁𝑒 𝒶𝓅𝓅𝑒𝒶𝓇𝓈 𝒾𝓃 𝓉𝒽𝑒 𝑔𝓁𝒾𝓉𝒸𝒽, 2026
onyx slab, carving

the oracle does not speak—
she flickers
between frames

prophecy buffering
in green-lit delay

𝒯𝒽𝑒 𝒞𝒶𝓀𝑒 𝒾𝓈 𝒶 𝐿𝒾𝑒, 2026

Curators: Lamija Čehajić and Jirka Skála

Artists: Anna-Marie Berdychová, Valentýna Janů, Tereza Kalousová, Bety Krňanská, Markéta Slaná, Nik Timková

6 March – 4 April 2026
GAVU, Prague

more here.

The exhibition The Cake is a Lie presents works by six Czech and Slovak artists, emerging from an environment that speaks the language of growth, flexibility and individual responsibility. The promise of mobility and personal success has become a horizon that quietly organizes expectations and everyday decisions — like a reward said to arrive if we persevere. The curatorial selection brings together two generations of artists whose works engage with the tension between aspiration and its social limits: between the pressure to respond and adapt, and the need to construct a coherent, legible identity capable of sustaining itself in public space. To what extent is this expectation shaped by social conditions, by gendered self-definition or class affiliation? The exhibited works share an interest in rituals of self-discipline, consumption and everyday aesthetics, in which this tension is continuously rehearsed.

˜”*°•.˜”*°• 𝒶𝒻𝓉𝑒𝓇𝒻𝒶𝒸𝓉𝓈 •°*”˜.•°*”˜ (𝓌𝑜𝓇𝓀 𝒾𝓃 𝓅𝓇𝑜𝑔𝓇𝑒𝓈𝓈 𝒾𝓃 𝓅𝓇𝑜𝑔𝓇𝑒𝓈𝓈 𝒾𝓃 𝓅𝓇𝑜𝑔𝓇𝑒𝓈𝓈), 2025
performative presentation & booklet

Uroboros Festival 2025: Permeating Bites

more here.

An ongoing body of work in which digitally generated outputs are translated into analogue photographic processes.
Synthetic images produced through computational systems are re-materialised as silver gelatin prints, allowing the digital image to pass through a sequence of chemical, material, and temporal transformations. These translations function as sites of reflection on the aesthetics of technological acceleration and on the infrastructures that sustain contemporary image production. Rather than treating digital images as immaterial entities, the work approaches them as traces embedded within broader ecological, economic, and epistemic systems.
The photographic process introduces a slow and laborious material procedure in which the image is developed through chemical reactions, manual handling, and time. Through this transformation, the image becomes a physical artefact: an authentic material inscription produced through labour and process.
In this sense, the resulting photographs remain genuine even when the images they contain are not factual. In this way, the photograph becomes a material trace of computation — a genuine artefact produced from an image that may never have existed.

𝒜 𝒮𝓅𝒶𝒸𝑒 𝒾𝓃 𝒶 𝒫𝓁𝒶𝒸𝑒 𝐼𝓉 𝐼𝓈 𝒩𝑜𝓉: 𝒜 𝟣𝟤-𝒽𝑜𝓊𝓇 (𝓅𝑒𝓇𝒻𝑜𝓇𝓂𝒶𝓉𝒾𝓋𝑒) 𝓇𝑒𝒻𝓁𝑒𝒸𝓉𝒾𝑜𝓃 𝑜𝓃 𝒶𝓇𝓉𝒾𝓈𝓉𝒾𝒸 𝓇𝑒𝓈𝑒𝒶𝓇𝒸𝒽, 2025

Curators: Irina Gheorghe, Anetta Mona Chișa and Lamija Čehajić

5 December 2025, 12pm to 12am
Academy of Fine Arts in Prague

more here.

The fourth edition of the AVU 12h (Performative) Reflection on Artistic Research explores the zones of absence that emerge when travelling between different fields. Starting from the assumption that the investigative demands of research always lead one, to a certain extent, to venturing out of the familiar towards unknown routes, the conference asks what spaces remain hollow in interdisciplinary dialogues, and how artistic investigations can navigate these spaces. It brings into question the possible exchanges between art and other disciplines, as well as the unfinished dialogues between various artistic traditions, asking how understandings of performance shift between visual art, dance, theatre and music; how drawing unfolds between object, notation or scientific exploration, and how the same idea might inhabit different areas of research in sometimes divergent ways.

The 12-hour (Performative) Reflection on Artistic Research proposes an experimental format at the intersection between a conference, a performance marathon and a sculptural engagement with space, unfolding over the course of a full day. It explores what it means to investigate not about art but through art: how this investigation can be carried out, how it can be presented, how it can produce knowledge and in what relationship this knowledge finds itself to other disciplines, and to a broader social context.

𝓉𝑒𝒸𝓉𝑜𝓃𝒾𝒸 𝑜𝓇𝒶𝒸𝓁𝑒𝓈 [𝓈𝒾𝓃𝑔𝒾𝓃𝑔 𝓂𝑜𝒹𝑒𝓁𝓈], 2025
singing AI models, data gathering and manipulation

Uroboros Summer School: PermaPrompting with Feral (AI)gents

more here.

An ongoing project that constructs AI agents derived from tectonic and volcanic datasets, translating geological events into distinct performative personas. Seismic activity, eruption patterns, and geophysical signals are processed as generative inputs, shaping each agent’s voice, behaviour, and aesthetic identity.
These agents emerge as synthetic pop figures who produce songs that function as speculative oracular systems. Rather than offering stable predictions, their outputs operate through ambiguity, repetition, and affect—where data is transformed into rhythm, melody, and lyrical fragments. In this context, pop music becomes a medium for encoding and transmitting signals that originate beyond human temporal and perceptual scales. The project interrogates the relationship between data, authorship, and prediction within computational culture, positioning AI not as a tool of clarity but as a site of distortion and translation. Geological processes—slow, vast, and largely inaccessible—are reconfigured into cultural forms that circulate within contemporary media systems.
Through this transformation, planetary activity is rendered as voice: unstable, mediated, and performative. The resulting works situate the oracle not as a figure of authority, but as an emergent effect of data systems—where meaning is continuously produced, deferred, and reinterpreted.

𝒢𝓇𝑜𝓌𝒾𝓃𝑔 𝐿𝓊𝓃𝑔𝓈, 2024
video essay, 16:30 min

When the seas dried, the primitive Fish left its associated milieu to explore land, forced to “stand on its own legs,” now carrying water on the inside, in the amniotic membranes protecting the embryo. The notion of distinct individualism is a fiction, a mythological convenience. Our comprehension of kinship and self-identity concludes that these oceanic microbes represent both “an ancestral form of ourselves” and an “alien” — a “strange intruder.” Lineages overgrown with algae and transparent silica gel sediments.

Growing Lungs examines conditions under which life is forced to transform in order to persist. The work takes as its point of departure the Bosnian mountain newt (Bosanski planinski triton), an endangered amphibian native to the Vranica Mountains in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Certain amphibian species retain larval characteristics and remain aquatic if their environment provides sufficient oxygen and stability. When these conditions fail, however, latent capacities are activated: the organism develops lungs and becomes capable of inhabiting land. What appears as an evolutionary adaptation is in fact a response to ecological insufficiency — a transformation compelled by the limits of a given environment.

Growing The project approaches breath as both a biological necessity and a political condition. Breath marks the interface between organism and milieu: the exchange through which bodies remain entangled with the atmospheres, waters, and infrastructures that sustain them. The newt’s potential to transform its respiratory system thus becomes a figure for the ways living beings respond to ecological stress, environmental degradation, and the uneven distribution of habitable worlds.
Rather than presenting adaptation as resolution, Growing Lungs attends to the fragile intervals in which new forms of life are forced to emerge. These transitional states — amphibious, partial, unresolved — suggest modes of perception shaped by displacement and environmental change. In this sense, the work considers how organisms, bodies, and knowledge systems respond when the conditions that once sustained them begin to fail.

𝒮𝓅𝒶𝒸𝑒𝓈 𝑜𝒻 𝐸𝓃𝓋𝒾𝓇𝑜𝓃𝓂𝑒𝓃𝓉𝒶𝓁 𝑀𝑜𝓊𝓇𝓃𝒾𝓃𝑔: 𝑅𝑒𝓂𝑒𝓂𝒷𝑒𝓇𝒾𝓃𝑔 𝓉𝒽𝑒 𝐸𝒶𝓇𝓉𝒽. 𝒜𝓇𝓉𝒾𝓈𝓉𝒾𝒸 𝒫𝑒𝓇𝓈𝓅𝑒𝒸𝓉𝒾𝓋𝑒𝓈 𝐹𝒶𝒸𝒾𝓃𝑔 𝐸𝓃𝓋𝒾𝓇𝑜𝓃𝓂𝑒𝓃𝓉𝒶𝓁 𝒟𝑒𝑔𝓇𝒶𝒹𝒶𝓉𝒾𝑜𝓃 & 𝒞𝓁𝒾𝓂𝒶𝓉𝑒 𝒞𝒽𝒶𝓃𝑔𝑒, 2024

Symposium theory and practice in dialogue

Curator: Lamija Čehajić

16 September 2024
History Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina

Spaces of Environmental Mourning is a research-based curatorial project exploring the concept of environmental grief through the intersection of contemporary art, theory, and institutional memory. Developed through an interdisciplinary methodology combining archival research, artistic practice, and public programming, the project examines how ecological loss is experienced, represented, and historicised.
Through lectures, artistic presentations, and screenings, the symposium positioned environmental mourning as a critical framework for understanding the entanglement of landscape, memory, and political histories.
By connecting artistic research with academic discourse and institutional collaboration, the project established a platform for addressing ecological grief as a historically situated and culturally mediated phenomenon. It further fostered dialogue between local and international practitioners, contributing to the development of interdisciplinary networks and expanding the visibility of environmental thought within the region.

𝑀𝒶𝒸𝓇𝑜𝒷𝒾𝑜𝓉𝑜𝓅𝑒𝓈: 𝒩𝑒𝓌 𝐸𝒸𝑜𝓁𝑜𝑔𝒾𝑒𝓈 𝑜𝒻 𝒯𝓇𝒶𝓃𝓈𝒸𝓊𝓁𝓉𝓊𝓇𝒶𝓁 𝐸𝓍𝒸𝒽𝒶𝓃𝑔𝑒𝓈, 2024
residency programme & site-specific festival

Curator: Lamija Čehajić
Hosting: Carolina Arandia, Hana Janečková, Karolína Jansová, Michal Kindernay, Rigoberto Nicolas Gallardo Schwan, Tereza Silon, Zlata Ziborova, Monika Collective (Anna Chrtková, Matyáš Grimmich, Karolína Schön)

In collaboration with KRAK Center for Contemporary Culture in Bihać, Bosnia and Herzegovina.

15 August - 7 September 2024

more here.

Macrobiotopes: New Ecologies of Transcultural Exchanges is an interdisciplinary artistic and research project exploring the intersections of ecology, migration, and cultural exchange through the lens of expanded ecologies and environmental interconnectivity. It examines how ecosystems, histories, and human communities intertwine, foregrounding the fluidity of both cultural and ecological identities in the context of global environmental change.
Bringing together artists, theorists, and local communities, the project fosters transcultural dialogue that moves beyond national and disciplinary boundaries. It unfolds through residencies, workshops, public interventions, and discursive formats, creating spaces for the exchange of knowledge, artistic practices, and situated ecological perspectives.
At its core, Macrobiotopes engages with the concept of the biotope—an environment that sustains life—and extends it to encompass cultural, social, and historical relations. Ecology is approached not as a fixed system, but as a dynamic field of interdependencies, shaped by movement, memory, and transformation.
Through site-specific research across multiple locations, the project develops situated understandings of cohabitation, sustainability, and shared vulnerability across human and non-human worlds. In doing so, it positions artistic practice as a mode of ecological inquiry—one that enables speculation, critical reflection, and the articulation of alternative environmental narratives.

𝐿𝒾𝓀𝑒 𝒶 𝑅𝑜𝑜𝓉, 2024

performative lecture & workshop

1-2 August 2024
Manifesto Gallery & National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sarajevo

This workshop was conceived as a collective reading space centred on carefully selected contemporary texts that engage feminist approaches to ecology. Through these readings, the project examined the relationships between humans and the natural world, critically addressing anthropocentric thinking and Western epistemologies of knowledge production about nature and the environment.
Beyond critical reflection, the texts functioned as tools for imagining alternative ecological futures—offering frameworks for thinking toward more just, sustainable, and interconnected worlds. Drawing from these discussions, participants engaged in a process of collective making, developing a short experimental film that translates theoretical inquiry into a shared artistic output.
Structured over three in-person sessions, the workshop fostered a pedagogical environment grounded in dialogue, collaboration, and situated knowledge exchange. The process emphasised collective authorship and critical pedagogy, positioning learning as a shared and evolving practice.
The resulting film was presented in September 2024 at the History Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, extending the workshop’s inquiry into a public and institutional context.

𝒲𝒾𝓁𝒹 𝐹𝓇𝓊𝒾𝓉𝓈: 𝒟𝒾𝓅𝓁𝑜𝓂𝒶 𝐸𝓍𝒽𝒾𝒷𝒾𝓉𝒾𝑜𝓃 𝒜𝒱𝒰, 2024

Curator: Lamija Čehajić

20-30 June 2024

Academy of Fine Arts in Prague

more here.

Wild Fruits emerges from a curatorial approach grounded in proximity and collective process rather than imposed conceptual unity. Instead of constructing a fixed framework to unify individual diploma works, the project departs from the question of whether such cohesion is necessary at all. It proposes a methodology that allows works to remain open, situated, and responsive to their conditions of display.
Developed in close dialogue with graduating artists, the curatorial process unfolded as a form of peer-based support, where empathy and attentiveness replaced authorial control. Within this fragile moment of transition—marked by uncertainty, emotional intensity, and the pressures of completion—the exhibition became a shared space of navigation rather than resolution.
Through this proximity, connections between works emerged organically. Recurring motifs of wild landscapes, overgrown gardens, fractured infrastructures, and self-sustaining ecologies formed a loose network of relations. These images—roots, weeds, unmanaged growth—echo the logic of wild fruits: forms that grow without cultivation, persisting at the edges of control, sustaining themselves through resilience and entanglement.
Wild Fruits approaches the exhibition as a form of rewilding: a space where individual practices coexist without full integration, engaging with forces beyond control, authorship, or stability. The works reflect on relationships between nature and culture, collective effort across human and more-than-human entities, and the search for situatedness within broader social and ecological structures.
Rather than producing a singular statement, the exhibition cultivates conditions for exchange, attention, and interdependence. It foregrounds artistic practice as a process of care—one that acknowledges vulnerability, fosters connection, and enables the slow formation of meaning within a shared environment.

𝐼𝒩-𝒮𝐼𝒯𝒰: 𝒜𝓇𝓉𝒾𝓈𝓉𝒾𝒸 𝒫𝑜𝓈𝒾𝓉𝒾𝑜𝓃𝓈 𝑜𝓃 𝐸𝓃𝒹𝒶𝓃𝑔𝑒𝓇𝑒𝒹 𝐵𝒾𝑜𝒹𝒾𝓋𝑒𝓇𝓈𝒾𝓉𝓎 𝒶𝓃𝒹 𝓉𝒽𝑒 𝒞𝑜𝑒𝓍𝒾𝓈𝓉𝑒𝓃𝒸𝑒 𝑜𝒻 𝒮𝓅𝑒𝒸𝒾𝑒𝓈, 2024

exhibition

Curators: Margarethe Makovec & Anton Lederer
Exhibiting: Darko Aleksovski, Lamija Čehajić • Anita Fuchs, Teuta Gatolin, Ralo Mayer, Irena Lagator Pejović, Nada Prlja, Oliver Ressler, Adrienn Újházi/ Nemanja Milenković, Driant Zeneli, Dardan Zhegrova

22 March - 18 May 2024

rotor Zentrum für zeitgenössische Kunst

𝒢𝓇𝑜𝓌𝒾𝓃𝑔 𝐿𝓊𝓃𝑔𝓈, video (18 min), 2024
𝒮𝒶𝓁𝒶𝓂𝒶𝓃𝒹𝑒𝓇’𝓈 𝒩𝑒𝓈𝓉, quilted cotton, 2024
𝒮𝓊𝓅𝓅𝓁𝑒 𝒮𝒽𝑜𝓇𝑒𝓈, quilted cotton, 2024

more here.

Following the exhibition EX-SITU organised by < rotor > in Sarajevo—dedicated to the endangered Bosnian mountain newt and its preservation within the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina—IN-SITU shifts the focus to another threatened species: the greater horseshoe bat, whose last breeding colony in Austria is located in the attic of Schloss Eggenberg in Graz.
Positioned in relation to this site, the exhibition brings together works that navigate the tensions between natural systems, human activity, and biodiversity, foregrounding endangered forms of life within the conditions of the Capitalocene.

𝐸𝒳-𝒮𝐼𝒯𝒰: 𝒜𝓇𝓉𝒾𝓈𝓉𝒾𝒸 𝒫𝑜𝓈𝒾𝓉𝒾𝑜𝓃𝓈 𝑜𝓃 𝐸𝓃𝒹𝒶𝓃𝑔𝑒𝓇𝑒𝒹 𝐵𝒾𝑜𝒹𝒾𝓋𝑒𝓇𝓈𝒾𝓉𝓎 𝒶𝓃𝒹 𝓉𝒽𝑒 𝒞𝑜𝑒𝓍𝒾𝓈𝓉𝑒𝓃𝒸𝑒 𝑜𝒻 𝒮𝓅𝑒𝒸𝒾𝑒𝓈, 2024

exhibition & symposium

Curators: Margarethe Makovec & Anton Lederer
Exhibiting: Darko Aleksovski, Lamija Čehajić, Danube Transformation Agency for Agency, Anita Fuchs, Teuta Gatolin, Ernst Koslitsch,
Polonca Lovšin, Ralo Mayer, Edith Payer, Irena Lagator Pejović, Nada Prlja, Lala Raščić, Oliver Ressler, Ivan Šuković, Adrienn Újházi / Nemanja Milenković, Anna Vasof, Driant Zeneli, Dardan Zhegrova

1 February – 3 March 2024

National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina

𝒢𝓇𝑜𝓌𝒾𝓃𝑔 𝐿𝓊𝓃𝑔𝓈, video (18 min), 2024
𝒮𝒶𝓁𝒶𝓂𝒶𝓃𝒹𝑒𝓇’𝓈 𝒩𝑒𝓈𝓉, quilted cotton, 2024
𝒮𝓊𝓅𝓅𝓁𝑒 𝒮𝒽𝑜𝓇𝑒𝓈, quilted cotton, 2024

more here.

In the Vranica Mountains in the heart of Bosnia and Herzegovina lives the Bosnian Mountain Newt—an endangered amphibian whose continued existence is increasingly uncertain. In response, the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina is developing a vivarium to protect the species ex situ, securing its survival within an institutional environment and enabling a potential future return to its natural habitat.
Taking this context as a point of departure, the exhibition brings together 18 artists and collectives from Central and South-Eastern Europe in dialogue with the Natural History Department of the National Museum in Sarajevo. The presented works explore the tensions between nature, human activity, and biodiversity, addressing endangered forms of life within the conditions of the Anthropocene. Drawing on scientific frameworks, multispecies perspectives, and shifting cultural understandings of life, the exhibition situates artistic practice within broader ecological and epistemological questions.

The project also included a one-day symposium bringing together artists, curators, and natural scientists, fostering an interdisciplinary exchange around ecological responsibility, conservation, and the role of art in relation to endangered life.

𝓉𝑜𝑜 𝓈𝓂𝒶𝓁𝓁 𝓉𝑜 𝒷𝑒𝒸𝑜𝓂𝑒 𝒶 𝓁𝒶𝓀𝑒 ~ 𝓉𝑜𝑜 𝓁𝒶𝓇𝑔𝑒 𝓉𝑜 𝒷𝑒 𝓈𝓌𝒶𝓁𝓁𝑜𝓌𝑒𝒹 𝒷𝓎 𝓉𝒽𝑒 𝑒𝒶𝓇𝓉𝒽, 2023
video essay, 15:50 min

There was a sparkling kind of water, glistening and strange, waking up from a deep, deep dream which held it captive for centuries. It awoke and remembered its flow — the pull of an ancient force that did not even need to whisper where it must go, yet it knew.
One drop. Two drops. Drop by drop it moved through a river, licking each pebble it swiftly slithered by. Until they all reached the dark, exhausted sea.
This old sea was once a myth — the waters of birth that no one remembered yet everyone felt in the liquids of their cells. The water kept between cellular walls, perhaps a secret to life. The catalyst of souls.

too small to become a lake ~ too large to be swallowed by the earth is a poetic video work that unfolds through a mythological narrative of water, sediment, and transformation. Moving between landscape observation and speculative storytelling, the work traces the circulation of bodies, minerals, and memories across environments shaped by migration and ecological change. Water appears as both substance and metaphor: a medium of gestation, erosion, and return. Through layered images and voice, the video reflects on how landscapes hold traces of movement and belonging, while bodies themselves become porous archives of geological and emotional histories.
Drawing on botanical and geological references — from the mineral structures embedded in plants to the slow sedimentation of stone and sand — the work situates human experience within broader cycles of transformation. In this sense, landscape is approached not as a stable territory but as a living field where histories of displacement, memory, and ecological processes continuously accumulate and dissolve.

𝒫𝑒𝓇𝒻𝑜𝓇𝓂𝒶𝓉𝒾𝓋𝑒 𝐿𝒶𝓃𝒹𝓈𝒸𝒶𝓅𝑒𝓈: 𝒮𝑒𝒹𝒾𝓂𝑒𝓃𝓉𝒶𝓉𝒾𝑜𝓃 𝑜𝒻 𝐵𝑒𝓁𝑜𝓃𝑔𝒾𝓃𝑔, 2023

𝓉𝑜𝑜 𝓈𝓂𝒶𝓁𝓁 𝓉𝑜 𝒷𝑒𝒸𝑜𝓂𝑒 𝒶 𝓁𝒶𝓀𝑒 ~ 𝓉𝑜𝑜 𝓁𝒶𝓇𝑔𝑒 𝓉𝑜 𝒷𝑒 𝓈𝓌𝒶𝓁𝓁𝑜𝓌𝑒𝒹 𝒷𝓎 𝓉𝒽𝑒 𝑒𝒶𝓇𝓉𝒽, video essay, 15:50 min

series of cyanotypes on textile
artist booklet

Diplomky 2024: Exhibition of Graduate works AVU

Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, 2023

Curators: Vojtěch März & Nela Klajbanová

Performative Landscapes: Sedimentation of Belonging is a diploma project examining landscape as a performative field shaped by migration, memory, and embodied perception. Rather than treating landscape as a stable geography or national territory, the work approaches it as a surface where histories of movement, displacement, and belonging gradually accumulate. Through video, spatial interventions, and observational gestures, the project traces how emotional and historical residues sediment within both environments and bodies. In this sense, belonging appears not as a fixed condition but as a shifting relationship between body, terrain, and the narratives that attempt to stabilize them. Alongside the video work, the project incorporates cyanotype prints produced through a chemical process based on iron salts — mineral compounds derived from ground stone. In this method, images emerge through exposure and sedimentation rather than mechanical reproduction. The cyanotype process becomes a material analogue to the conceptual framework of the project: landscape is not represented but slowly inscribed through chemical reactions that mirror the accumulation of geological and emotional traces within the terrain.

𝐼𝓃𝓈𝒾𝒹𝑒𝓇: 𝒰𝓃𝓌𝓇𝒶𝓅𝓅𝒾𝓃𝑔 𝑅𝑒𝒶𝓁𝒾𝓉𝓎, 2020 - 2023
multimedia performance for one person

CED Terén, Brno
Tvárnost paměti, Pardubice
4+4 Days in Motion 2020, Prague
Alfréd ve dvoře, Prague
Tatwerk, Berlin
tranzit.ro, Cluj-Napoca
Prague Quadrennial 2023

Director: Cristina Maldonado
Devisers & performers: Cristina Maldonado, Eva Rosemarijn, Lea Kukovičič, Keya Singh
Performers: Lamija Čehajić, Isabela Juchniewicz
Dramaturg consultant: Sodja Lotker

more here.

In everyday life, technology enables us to exist simultaneously in multiple places. We are immersed in continuous negotiation with things, processes, and people that are not physically present. These encounters are often understood as “virtual presence”—as representations of an original that exists elsewhere. As such, they are frequently placed lower on a scale of reality, perceived as less capable of affecting us. They cannot be touched, and therefore are often not considered fully real.
For some, the virtual offers a space of temporary escape; for others, it poses the threat of replacing reality altogether. For us, however, there is no opposition between the virtual and the real. Together, they form a continuum of mixed realities.
We understand this condition as one of constant navigation. We perform complex maneuvers to orient ourselves within these overlapping layers, adapting to technological extensions that we coexist with. These systems actively shape our perception and our relationships with others.
Insider explores how this entanglement of realities affects the body and the experience of presence. During the performance, each viewer’s choices produce a distinct mode of engagement, shaping how the work is encountered and how this constructed world is inhabited.

𝒾𝓃𝓈𝓉𝓇𝓊𝒸𝓉𝒾𝑜𝓃𝓈 𝒻𝑜𝓇 𝓌𝑒𝒶𝓇𝒾𝓃𝑔 𝒹𝑜𝓌𝓃, 2022
two-channel video, polished cobble stone

AVU klauzury

This work takes the form of a two-channel video installation, presented on mobile phones placed on a table, accompanied by a series of polished cobblestones. The videos depict hands repeatedly caressing the surface of a stone, performing a simple gesture extended over time.
Through continuous touch, the stone is gradually worn down—its sharp edges softened through repetition. The gesture oscillates between care and erosion, between tenderness and persistence. What appears as a minimal action accumulates into a transformative process, where time, pressure, and contact become agents of change.
The work engages with performative modes of repetition, considering how gestures produce meaning not through singular acts but through duration and insistence. The act of caressing becomes both a form of labour and a method: a way of relating to material that resists immediacy.The presence of polished stones within the installation reflects the outcome of this process, translating the temporal unfolding of the gesture into a physical state. These objects hold the trace of touch, suggesting that even the most rigid forms can be altered through sustained attention.

𝒾𝒹𝑒𝓋𝒾𝒸𝑒𝓈 𝑜𝒻 𝓈𝑒𝑒𝒾𝓃𝑔, 2020
light box, film positives, glass, optical devices

4+4 Days in Motion, Strašnická škola

This work extends the performance Insider through a site-specific installation developed in Strašnická kola, composed of analogue film positives, light boxes, and photographic viewing devices. The installation functions as a fragmented visual field through which the viewer navigates different layers of presence and perception.
The viewing devices structure how images are encountered, requiring the body to adjust, lean in, focus, and move. Perception becomes situated and partial, unfolding through individual choices and trajectories. The installation does not present a unified image, but a dispersed set of visual fragments that must be actively assembled. Through this, the work examines how contemporary forms of mediation influence our sense of presence, asking how we locate ourselves within overlapping realities. It proposes viewing as a performative act—one that is shaped by technology, but grounded in the materiality of both the reality and the body.

𝒜𝑔𝒶𝒾𝓃𝓈𝓉 𝒞𝓁𝒶𝓈𝓈𝒾𝒻𝒾𝒸𝒶𝓉𝒾𝑜𝓃, 2020
performative reading & sound installation

Palermo Summer School

Giardino Garibaldi in Palermo

This work takes the form of a performative reading accompanied by a sound installation, situated among the fig trees of Giardino Garibaldi in Palermo. The reading draws from an old Italian biology textbook found in the city, re-voicing its language within the presence of the trees it attempts to describe. The fig trees addressed in the work are strangling figs—species that grow by wrapping around a host, gradually overtaking it. This mode of growth complicates the terms through which life is classified: survival appears as entanglement, care as pressure, coexistence as slow transformation. Addressing the trees as listeners rather than objects of study, the work redirects scientific language toward the non-human. The textbook, shaped by systems of taxonomy and control, is displaced into a setting where its authority becomes unstable—its descriptions spoken back to the very forms of life they attempt to contain.The fig trees, marked by histories of cultivation, displacement, and colonial circulation, become interlocutors in this exchange. Their presence unsettles distinctions between native and foreign, cultivated and wild, revealing the limits of imposed ecological order. Rather than producing knowledge, the work remains within the act of addressing: a misaligned pedagogy, a lesson delivered to beings that neither require nor return understanding, yet remain fully entangled in its consequences.

𝓉𝒽𝑒 𝓇𝑒𝓈𝒾𝒹𝓊𝑒 𝑜𝒻 𝒶 𝓂𝑒𝓉𝒶𝓅𝒽𝑜𝓇, 2019
interactive video installation, post-consumer waste shells (archival work)

the residue of a metaphor explores how systems of logic that appear universal are shaped by the social and ecological structures in which they emerge. What is commonly understood as rational or self-evident often carries the imprint of deeper historical processes that have structured relations between humans, nonhuman entities,
Based on the concept of ecognosis, signifying a strange or "deep knowing" of our interconnectedness with nature, or learning to coexist with the strange, ecological “other”, the work reflects on how contemporary ecological awareness destabilizes anthropocentric perspectives.
The installation combined generative video environment with an accumulation of post-consumer waste shells. Removed from their original ecosystems and redistributed through global commodity circulation, these shells become material traces of extractive economic systems. Their presence points to the disruption of natural cycles of production and reuse, replaced by the linear logic of extraction, consumption, and forgetting.
Within the installation, an evolving digital organism unfolds through fractal structures generated by algorithmic relationships between visual elements. These formations follow simple parent–child logics of growth and rotation, introducing chance and variation that mimic processes of biological evolution.
Through the interaction between algorithmic image generation and displaced natural materials, the residue of a metaphor reflects on the fragile boundary between nature and culture, suggesting that technological systems themselves remain entangled within the ecological conditions they attempt to transcend.

𝒸𝓇𝑒𝓋𝒾𝒸𝑒𝓈 𝓌𝑒 𝒻𝒾𝓁𝓁 / 𝓂𝑒𝓉𝒽𝑜𝒹𝑜𝓁𝑜𝑔𝓎 𝑜𝒻 𝒸𝒶𝓇𝑒 𝒾𝒾., 2019

installation, stone, cobblestones found in Kasarna, found metal, twigs, leaves, plants, feathers, cloth, thread, gauze, wallpaper glue, paper, soil

Kasárna Karlín

Crevices We Fill (Methodology of Care II) is a site-specific installation responding to the temporal and spatial conditions of the former military pool within the barracks complex in Kasarna Karlín. Developed through an extended engagement with the site, the work introduces a series of objects embedded into the space as subtle interventions.
These objects emerge from the architecture of the pool and the contingency of the surrounding courtyard. They are presented as curated instances of encounters with the materiality of the site—fragments extracted from a space once structured by discipline and control, now suspended in a state of transition. They respond to a gap in the continuity of the site’s history: a brief inconsistency, a crevice that calls to be approached with care.
The installation reflects on the disciplining of bodies and the material conditions through which practices of inclusion and exclusion are enacted. In response to the violence historically embedded in normative structures, the work searches for an alternative visual language—one grounded in gestures of repair, wrapping, and rehabilitation. Operating from a post-human perspective, it considers non-human entities as active participants within spatial and social relations, acknowledging their capacity to register and communicate the histories they inhabit.
The project is part of an ongoing artistic practice centred on what I refer to as a methodology of care. Within this framework, the act of intervening in the site becomes a process of tending—an attempt to address historical trauma not through representation, but through material engagement. Rather than constructing an immersive environment, the work invites a tactile and bodily response, foregrounding the presence of objects as carriers of memory.
Research into the site focused on traces of time—both deliberate acts of destruction and the slow processes of natural deterioration. These fractures, cracks, and residues become points of attention: places to mend, wrap, and hold. Through the associative qualities of materials, the installation proposes a symbolic healing of the space, developing a micro-discourse that reconfigures hierarchies of value and significance. The collected materials—stones, branches, and metal fragments—are gathered from the courtyard and brought into the interior to be cared for. Their former functions, often tied to potential or actual violence, are suspended. They are placed into a condition of rest, as if within an infirmary, where they can recover from their histories. Cobblestones, once embedded in the ground to sustain the rhythm of marching, are repositioned as politicised objects—capable of both endurance and disruption. Broken branches and fragile twigs are mended, wrapped, and held, their vulnerability acknowledged. Through these gestures, the work asks how spaces marked by historical violence might be approached through care. How can the wounds of the social body—experienced through individual embodiment—be addressed without reproducing the structures that caused them? The installation proposes a form of situated, material attention: a quiet insistence on repair, on responsibility, and on the possibility of transformation emerging from within the crevices of time.

𝓂𝑒𝓉𝒽𝑜𝒹𝑜𝓁𝑜𝑔𝓎 𝑜𝒻 𝒸𝒶𝓇𝑒 𝒾. / 𝓅𝒽𝑒𝓃𝑜𝓂𝑒𝓃𝑜𝓁𝑜𝑔𝒾𝒸𝒶𝓁 𝓇𝑒𝒸𝒾𝓅𝑒𝓈, 2018

4+4 Days in Motion 2018, Prague

Methodology of Care first emerged within 4+4 Days in Motion (2018) as a site-specific intervention responding directly to the spatial and material conditions of its placement. Modest in scale yet inherently bound to its environment, the work cannot be separated from the site without losing its meaning. The space itself becomes both subject and medium—an object of attention approached through embodied, situated practices.

The work invites a shift in perception, encouraging an intimate engagement with the environment and with oneself:

find the softest spot in the space
think of the time you wish you had apologised
caress the nail with your cheek

tools of kindness
to be found

there in the workstation, reflect on your experience:

write it down
wrap it as a gesture of reconciliation
archive it on the shelf to the left

𝒮𝓉𝑒𝓇𝑒𝑜𝓅𝓇𝑒𝓈𝑒𝓃𝒸𝑒, 2018 - 2021
performance, 70 min

Alfréd ve dvoře, Prague
Conjunto de artes escenicas, Guadalajara, Mexico
UNAM, Mexico City

Concept, video, and installation: Cristina Maldonado
Performers: Cristina Maldonado, Sodja Zupanc Lotker / Petra Hauerová, Lamija Čehajić
Dramaturgy: Sodja Zupanc Lotker

more here.

Stereopresence explores, in the form of a visual essay, the ambiguous boundaries between the physical and the immaterial, the real and the imaginary—between what is and what is not. It captures a state of presence in which the real and the virtual continuously overlap and co-exist.
Inspired by early video art, the performance is preceded by an artistic research into degenerative memory disorders associated with dementia and senility, as well as the formation of stereotypical imaginary worlds—both shared and deeply private. The loss of short-term memory and the gradual disconnection from the immediate world are commonly understood as symptoms of illness. Dementia is considered incurable, and dominant perspectives insist that no reality exists beyond the one we collectively recognize as real. However, the work proposes an alternative reading: to consider dementia as a peculiar and complex mode of existence—a strategy that all

𝓂𝑒𝓂𝑜𝓇𝒶𝒷𝒾𝓁𝒾𝒶 𝑜𝒻 𝓈𝑜𝓂𝑒𝓉𝒽𝒾𝓃𝑔 𝓃𝑒𝓋𝑒𝓇 𝓈𝑒𝑒𝓃, 2018
video essay, 10 min

Pokoje 2018
Hybernská, Prague

The work explores how questions of ethnic and national belonging continue to echo within us long after we consciously reflect on — or attempt to distance ourselves from — the notions of nationality and collective identity. These echoes appear as subtle, almost imperceptible modalities of being: cultural habits, gestures, and reflexes shaped by early enculturation within specific sociopolitical environments.
The project examines these residual traces of belonging as they surface within the experience of migration. Rather than presenting identity as a stable category, the work approaches it as a layered condition in which learned behaviours and cultural “ticks” persist even as the rational, global self attempts to discard them as obsolete.
Originally presented as a video projection mapped into a drawer, the work stages a poetic reflection on these remnants of cultural belonging. Through displaced images gathered from sites connected to the artist’s origin and a series of performative gestures, the piece attempts to decipher how identity is negotiated between contradictory feelings of empowerment and shame that often accompany the experience of being perceived as “the other”.