L’identité

L’identité, curated by Pavlína Morganová at the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague, brings together several generations of artists around questions of identity, gender, corporeality and self-representation. Taking the life and work of Toyen as its historical point of departure, the exhibition considers identity not as a fixed category but as something continuously produced through the relationship between the self, the body and the ways in which others perceive us.

The exhibition’s French title connects two distinct references. It recalls Toyen’s life in Paris after the Second World War while also referring to Milan Kundera’s novel L’Identité, in which personal identity becomes unstable through the discrepancy between inner experience and external perception. Both references introduce a central tension running throughout the exhibition: the distance between who we understand ourselves to be and the identities that language, society and images construct around us.

Toyen occupies a foundational position within this dialogue. From the adoption of a gender-neutral pseudonym to an artistic practice that resisted conventional social and sexual categories, Toyen developed a position in which artistic and personal identity remained deliberately difficult to stabilise. This legacy provides a historical framework through which later approaches to the body, gender and representation can be viewed.

Adriena Šimotová’s work turns toward the vulnerability and physical presence of the human body, while Margita Titlová Ylovsky uses gesture and experimental photographic processes to explore corporeality and energy. Veronika Šrek Bromová, Kateřina Vincourová and Lenka Klodová approach sexuality, mythology, motherhood and the politics of the body through photography, installation, sculpture and performance.

A younger generation expands these questions through different forms of mediation. Pavla Sceranková examines the relationship between bodily experience and surrounding space; Mark Ther connects queer identity and sexuality with suppressed layers of Central European history; Anetta Mona Chişa and Lucia Tkáčová address gendered power structures through irony and institutional critique. The collaborative practice of unconductive trash reworks historical imagery and gender stereotypes through sewn painting, while Lucie Rosická turns to textiles and everyday rituals associated with intimacy and sexuality.

Across these different generations, identity appears less as something that can be conclusively represented than as a field of negotiation. Bodies, social roles, memories and cultural images continually reshape one another. L’identité focuses precisely on these moments of instability, when the distinction between the self and its representation becomes uncertain and identity reveals itself as layered, relational and subject to change.