GRIDFALL: Jakub Jansa, Pavla Malinová

GRIDFALL is a site-specific exhibition by Jakub Jansa and Pavla Malinová created for Laichter House, the former publishing house designed by Jan Kotěra between 1908 and 1910. Conceived at the beginning of the twentieth century as an expression of confidence in modern architecture, culture and social progress, the building becomes an active element of an exhibition concerned with what happens when systems of orientation begin to lose their stability.

The architecture of Laichter House carries the traces of an earlier belief in the possibility of organising space, knowledge and society through coherent structures. GRIDFALL begins at the point where such structures start to fracture. The grid suggested by the title can be understood as architecture, social organisation, chronology or a system of perception: a framework that makes the world legible until its coordinates no longer hold.

Pavla Malinová approaches this instability primarily through painting. Her compositions construct environments in which figures, symbols and architectural or organic forms appear suspended between different temporalities. Mythological references coexist with contemporary visual language, producing scenes that feel simultaneously archaic and speculative.

Jakub Jansa works across video and installation, constructing fictional narratives through which familiar social structures become strange. His characters and environments operate according to their own systems of behaviour, hierarchy and symbolism, allowing questions of identity, power and belonging to emerge through humour and stylisation.

Despite their different media, both artists work with forms of fiction that destabilise linear understandings of time. Their works do not present the future as a destination toward which the present naturally progresses. Instead, past, present and imagined futures overlap, creating a space in which cultural memory and speculation become difficult to separate.

Within Laichter House, these approaches enter into dialogue with an architecture historically associated with modernity’s confidence in progress. GRIDFALL turns that confidence into a question: what forms of orientation remain possible once the structures designed to organise reality themselves become unstable?