ANNA HULAČOVÁ. HUNGRY HARVEST @ THE HALL
THE HALL opened its programme for contemporary art with a solo presentation of the Czech artist Anna Hulačová. The exhibition marked the beginning of PART International Art Residency Austria.
In her sculptural works Anna Hulačová creates poetic-surreal alternative worlds in which utopian hopes and dystopian threats interpenetrate. Seeing agriculture as one of the main driving forces behind ecological and social upheaval, she examines its influence on the relationship between humans, the environment and technology. Rather than despairingly anguish about the future, ideas of innovative change and renewal come to the fore: hybrid entities made out of humans, machines, plants and microorganisms come into contact, making new forms of life appear conceivable.
The installation of freely arranged concrete sculptures shows peculiar symbioses: abstracted figures, often without any individual features, blend with agricultural or technological apparatuses into hybrid bodies. In Charioteer with Edaphon (2023) a potato planter becomes a chariot, drawn and driven by soil animals like rainworms, insect larvae and woodlice. Organisms mutate to adapt to an environment increasingly hostile to life; in a science-fiction inspired hybrid landscape, Anna Hulačová presents the vision of a cultural-agricultural revolution. Cooperation springs into life: a moth needs a pair of glasses to move along, leek is harvested together, corn dances in a circle, and alien bees joyfully await the chance to save the planet.
Concrete is deployed as ambivalent material in Anna Hulačová‘s works: raw and brutal, yet omnipresent and almost “folksy”. The artist contrasts this everyday quality with fragile ceramic or lined elements.
The exhibition title challenges the logic of industrial agricultural production based on efficiency, mass consumption and the exploitation of resources. This practice not only depletes soils but also changes our relationship to food and nature. Anna Hulačová asks: “It’s our greedy need to appropriate resources that leads to the uncertainty of the harvest.Intelligent machines are part of our bodies and landscapes, and we are de facto dependent on them, and without them the agricultural sectors would not be able to feed the mass of people today. But this leads precisely to the question, what if our crops are reduced or the soil is no longer able to produce?”
A concern Joni Mitchell soincisively expressed as early as 1970: They paved paradise and put up a parking lot…
All Works: Courtesy of the artist and Hunt Kastner, Prague
Opening hours:
each Friday 3-6 pm, each Saturday 10-12 am and by appointment: welcome@partresidency.at
Curator’s Tours:
Fri 20.06.2025, 5 pm, Fri 27.06.2025, 5 pm, Fri 04.07.2025, 5 pm
Biography Anna Hulačová was born in 1984 in Sušice, a town in southwest Bohemia, Czech Republic, and graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. She lives and works in Klučov, near Český Brod in central Bohemia. Anna Hulačová will be artist in-residence in 2026.
