the resonant body of the exhibition reflecting not only historical memory but also growing uncertainty about the direction in which today’s world should be heading. This sensitive installation, engaging with the concept and history of the Laichter House, invites visitors to experience this complex place as a stage to explore how our ability to navigate reality is shifting—as original systems and even perceptions of time dissolve, and belief in building the future becomes part of the past.

The approaches of both artists create symbolically charged fictional worlds that transcend ordinary perceptions of time and space. Malinová primarily works with painting, while Jansa focuses on video and installation, yet both share an interest in stylized imagery, mythology, and layered storytelling.

In his video installation Pumpkinville (2025), the final episode of the Club of Opportunities series, Jakub Jansa constructs a fictional world of “vegesociety,” inhabited by hybrid rather than human entities that allegorically embody class aspirations, cultural performativity, and ontological uncertainty. Central to this world is the “celeryman,” an outsider of the vegesociety who plays the role of a Nordic-type detective trapped in a simulated world reminiscent of The Truman Show, where the illusion of life in the Global North is gradually unmasked. Within this surreal fictional framework, the true protagonist is a pumpkin who remains unaware that she lives in an artificially constructed reality. The Celeryman desperately tries to awaken her to the truth, revealing cracks in the fabricated world, while she remains blissfully indifferent—even as everything around her falls apart. Through this absurd allegory, the film critically exposes the illusions and falsehoods that often underpin today’s cultural and nationalist ideologies.

Pavla Malinová’s paintings expand the exhibition space of GRIDFALL by adding an introspective dimension, where collapse does not act destructively but as a tectonic shift in perception and feeling. Malinová treats the image as an open field in which the dissolution of form becomes a creative principle. Her paintings oscillate between the organic and the synthetic, structure and intuition, stability and its loss. Fragments of shapes and hybrid figures evoke remnants of cultural sediments in collective memory that cannot be definitively deciphered. Vivid colors, ambivalent symbolism, and layered composition create images that function as sensors of a mutable reality. In the context of the exhibition, her work thus appears as a manifestation of a state where uncertainty is not a weakness but a condition for a new mode of existence.

The building in which the exhibition is set was originally conceived as a space meant to embody the spirit of a new era—a place grounded in faith in progress, and in the power of language and architecture as instruments of cultural transformation. Jan Kotěra believed that the artist’s task was to achieve an “ideal of the contemporary view,” or the “truth of one’s time.” The Laichter House gave form to this idea—but eventually became a relic of it. After the publishing house was dissolved in 1949, not only was its original mission erased, but also 27,000 books—carriers of “dangerous” ideas—disappeared.

The house survived, but fell silent. Only now, as the founder’s great-great-grandson carefully restores the building, does it enter an asynchronous gesture of return and reinterpretation. This layered temporality is activated by the GRIDFALL exhibition, which allows the house to resonate as a porous simultaneity between past and present. This is not a vision of collapse, but a portrayal of a moment in which once-stable frameworks dissolve—where sensitivity takes the place of systems, and intuition replaces certainty. The exhibition opens a space for new forms of existence that are only just emerging—born of fluidity, fragmentation, and a playful shifting of meaning.

Natálie Kubíková, Eva Vel—