FOTOGRAF ZONE FESTIVAL 2026
1. OCTOBER 2026 – 11. OCTOBER 2026
The festival approaches art not as an isolated sphere, but as part of a broader ecosystem of sharing and sensitivity. We are interested in forms of coexistence and attention that resist the logic of constant acceleration and turn toward more intuitive ways of engaging with natural resources.
Small moments in which one can once again experience closeness, focus, and a connection to that which cannot be fully owned or extracted. Here, art does not appear as a product, but rather as a training ground for developing understanding and discovering new possibilities, whether we speak of interspecies coexistence, different perspectives, or sustaining the local cultural ecosystem.
Fotograf Zone Gallery • TYRŠ the human lab • Public Space of the Holešovice Market • Můstek Metro Vestibule
News
#2 min Editorial
SAVE THE DATE – FOTOGRAF ZONE FESTIVAL 2026
Fotograf Zone Festival invites audiences to its 16th edition, taking place from 1 to 11 October 2026 across several venues in Prague. Under the title Wild Kin, this year’s festival will explore questions of relationships, attention, and forms of coexistence in the contemporary world.
#2 min Editorial
About The Festival
Opening – 16th Fotograf Zone Festival
We warmly invite you to the 16th edition of the Fotograf Zone Festival, taking place across several venues in Prague from 1–11 October 2026.
Nela Kováč Britaňáková – Aleuronové Zrno
In her practice, Nela Britaňáková works with ceramics, spatial installation, and performance, exploring the relationship between the body, material, and space. Her installations combine ceramic matter, textiles, handmade costumes, and the body to create environments that exist between sculpture, performance, and living systems.
Radan Haluzík – Nature in the City, or the City in Nature?
We invite you to a lecture by Radan Haluzík: Nature in the City, or the City in Nature?
Gabriela Benish-Kalná – Anxiety of Multispecies Care
Gabriela Benish-Kalná examines the romanticisation of rural life and the modern dream of communal, self-sufficient farming. Her work addresses the growing urgency of the agricultural crisis while looking to long-established farming practices for ways of adapting to a new, life-threatening climate.
Šárka Zahálková – By Means of Exchange Goods and Services
Welcome to the waves of a capitalized landscape. Holešovice Market, originally a slaughterhouse, has for many years served primarily as a site of trade in diverse goods. It is a place where goods, services, contacts, ideas, and emotions are exchanged.
Jakub Tulinger – Bicycle ride
We invite you to join Jakub Tulinger’s bicycle ride from Holešovice Market to Fotograf Zone Gallery, where we will arrive for the opening of Jochen Lempert’s exhibition!
Jochen Lempert – SOUSEDÉ
Sousedé—the Czech word for neighbours—gives title to Jochen Lempert’s exhibition at Fotograf Gallery. Rather than placing humans at the centre, Lempert invites us to perceive our living environment as a habitat shared by humans and other living beings, a shared ecology of presences, where encounters often remain fleeting, unnoticed, or hidden in plain sight.
Exhibition Opening: VOŠG a SPŠG Hellichova – Tabula rasa
The College of Graphic Arts and the Secondary School of Graphic Arts in Prague, collectively known as Hellichovka, have ranked among the Czech Republic’s leading schools of applied arts for more than a century. Since their founding in 1920, they have educated generations of prominent figures in Czech photography, graphic design, and the printing arts. Their teaching combines traditional craft techniques with contemporary technologies, emphasizing the development of an individual artistic approach, experimentation, and interdisciplinary collaboration. It is within this environment that the works presented in the exhibition Tabula Rasa were created.
Magdalena Wutkovská – Wild kin of a teeny-tiny kind
In this workshop participants will have a chance to look at the omitted and small creatures through the lens of experimental photography techniques. It is opened to anybody from 7 to 107.
Guided Tour for Seniors
Elpida is a Czech non-profit organisation that has been helping people age actively and with dignity for more than 20 years. Through its educational and cultural centres in Prague, it offers a wide range of courses, creative workshops, lectures, and community activities for older adults. Elpida also operates the free Senior Helpline, publishes Vitalmagazine, runs the OLD’s COOL podcast, and develops projects that challenge stereotypes about ageing while fostering creativity, learning, and intergenerational dialogue.
The Applied Photography studio at FUD UJEP – Photosynthesis
An outdoor exhibition in the refugium of the Botanic Garden of the Faculty of Science, Charles University presents projects by students of the Applied Photography Studio at FUD UJEP. The assignment was inspired by a conservation program for endangered plant species developed in cooperation with the Union of Botanical Gardens of the Czech Republic. Disappearing flora that can no longer reproduce independently in the wild and whose survival depends on human intervention became the subject of open-ended artistic interpretation.
Markéta Kinterová – Reading Against Acceleration
We cordially invite you to the event “Come Read with Markéta Kinterová and Guest Kateřina Vídenová.”
Miloš Vojtěchovský – An Experiential Tour of Hell
The Central Slaughterhouse in Holešovice once resembled an almost self-contained town, or even a ghetto. Hidden behind high walls, the ten-hectare complex comprised 49 halls, a network of streets and squares, a power station, a bank, underground passageways, and railway tracks connecting it to the nearby Bubny station. A century ago, butchers here slaughtered and butchered as many as 87 million cows, pigs, and horses each year. The sound walk through the former slaughterhouse grounds evokes a time when the cries and wails of animals being transported and killed could be heard far across the surrounding area, while the drains carried the faint squeaking of a population of hundreds of thousands of rats living in the underground passages of this extermination camp in Prague 7.
Anna Mírková – Social Worlds of the River
A line branching across maps, a name, a source and an estuary; a metaphor, an image, a kindred species, a neighbour—what can a river be? Where do we draw its boundaries, and where do we draw the boundaries between ourselves and the river?
Denisa Půbalová – Playground for Soft Measures
The workshop invites participants to playfully explore how materials register their surroundings, and how we might perceive, map, and “measure” these traces differently. Working with soft and mutable materials—bubbles, foam, dough, or other living, transforming, fermenting matter—we will observe how relationships between the body and its environment become visible within and through them.
Azolla Collective – Asphalt Lovers
Performance unfolds in an asphalt landscape inhabited by hybrid bodies. An abandoned urban environment becomes a site of encounter, a temporary nest, where three beings navigate loneliness, frustration, and collapse while searching for forms of belonging. Through embodied perception, openness, and entangled relations with more-than-human entities, they seek ways to co-create, share and co-inhabit the world together.
Elpida Presents: Voices of Older Generations
How does this year’s festival theme, Wild Kin, resonate with the perspectives of older generations? Join us for an intimate screening of photographs created by participants in Elpida Centre’s photography course, led by Viktor Chomiak. The screening will be followed by an open discussion exploring different ways photography can help us reflect on our relationships with one another, with nature, and with the world around us. The event is open to everyone, regardless of age.
Tensions of Opposites
Mountains and holes cover an Anthropocenic landscape. Decomposed bodies. Fragmented images. The mutable materials presented at the Tensions of Opposites exhibition become traces of a world in which stability exists only as a fleeting moment. What may seem solid is really just a knot in the web of constant transformation. Every form carries within its own dissolution and the potential for its recombination.
FOTOGRAF ZONE FESTIVAL 2026 – Wild Kin
Fotograf Zone Festival invites audiences to its 16th edition, taking place from 1 to 11 October 2026 across several venues in Prague. Under the title Wild Kin, this year’s festival will explore questions of relationships, attention, and forms of coexistence in the contemporary world.
Tyrš Human Lab – (not) so far
The installation and film programme at Tyrš Human Lab examines the imprint of human power across different forms of community and coexistence. It moves from plant life, increasingly severed from the soil through advanced horticultural technologies, through animal breeding designed to maximise selected traits, to persistent colonial practices that continue to affect communities of humans, animals and plants, as well as the non-living environment.
Holešovice Market – Wandering
The outdoor installation at Holešovice Market delves into non-human worlds on a microscopic scale: from chemical elements imperceptible to the human senses to environments co-produced by technology and shaped by fluid forms of materiality.
Apollo’s Tropic / Skin Replica
Apollo’s Tropic brings together Néphéli Barbas and Martin Herold in a collaborative project exploring space as a site of memory and transformation through painting, objects, and architectural fragments. The exhibition traces how layers of time and human presence become embedded in façades, details, and the marks of everyday use.
Hynek Alt – Fantom
Fantom, a site-specific installation by Hynek Alt, returns to the site where J. Sudek once worked in Prague’s Újezd district. The central element of the exhibition is a video created within a digital reconstruction of the studio. The exhibition includes a new photographic work that returns to Sudek’s portraits of veiled faces.
Michal Kalhous – Goosefoot and Raspberries, The Road to Victory
The exhibition *Goosefoot and Raspberries, The Road to Victory* presents a series of photographs created over the recent period. It is an experimental tool of synthesis and a search for a path to fulfillment. At the same time, it is a purposeful, captivating exploration of suddenness and their relationships. *Goosefoot and Raspberries, The Road to Victory* is once again an attempt at a dialogue between inner experience and a higher, transcendent order.
Infrastructures of Imagination
The exhibition explores how mythical and ritual narratives are reconfigured within an environment of data abstraction, distributed knowledge, and the aesthetic protocols of the present, and how digital culture shapes new forms of storytelling.
Gabriela Benish-Kalná
Gabriela Benish-Kalná’s artistic practice has long focused on ecology and climate adaptation. Combining analogue photography and installation with direct social engagement, her work seeks to challenge the conventional divide between nature and culture while envisioning a more just and sustainable future.
FOTOGRAF Josef Sudek
The legendary Josef Sudek (1896–1976) is now regarded as one of the great figures of world photography. After his death, a substantial part of his artistic estate was donated by his sister Božena to the collections of the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague. It comprises approximately 21,000 original prints and around 27,000 negatives.
Mirror on the Easel
The exhibition by František Petrák and Tomáš Absolon is an intergenerational dialogue on the challenges of two-dimensional representation. Both artists conceive of the painter as an intermedial translator moving between everyday poetics, didactics, and the history of painting.
The Real Image
Since the very beginnings of the medium, artists have used the apparent documentary quality of photomechanically reproduced images as a tool for manipulation and play. Whether altered mechanically in the darkroom or digitally, the “real” image is often subsequently manipulated for a variety of purposes, acquiring a new meaning that was not part of the original intention at the moment the shutter was released. In other cases, photographic documentation appropriated from the media is used artistically in montages, serving as a medium of wordless political critique.
Fotograf Zone Festival #16 team:
Exhibition Curators | Ivana Hrončeková, Markéta Kinterová, Anna Voswinckel
Program Dramaturgy | Markéta Kinterová, Barbora Vanická Čápová
Artistic Director of Fotograf Zone | Markéta Kinterová
Executive Director of Fotograf Zone | Marie Rozmánková
Festival Operations Director | Pavel Matěj
Research | Světlana Malina, Sára Märc, Tereza Špinková
International Grants Manager | Sandra Faragula
Office Manager & Fundraising Assistant | Aurika Bugaeva
PR & Social Media | Tereza Vacková
Social Media Manager | Klára Kudláček
Graphic Design | publikum.design / Anežka Hrubá Ciglerová, Richard Wilde
Web Editor & Distribution | Barbora Poláchová
Production | Kristýna Khinová
Technical Production | Martin Cink
The Fotograf Zone Festival is organized by Fotograf 07 z.s.
Jungmannova 19/7
Prague 1, 110 00
festival@fotograf.zone
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ORGANIZER
PARTNERS
Ministry of Culture Czech Republic
Městská část Praha 7
Česko-německý fond budoucnosti
Česká centra
Goethe-Institut Česká republika
PATRONAGE
Magistrát Hlavního města Prahy
Městská část Praha 7
Městská část Praha 1
Cooperation
Holešovická tržnice, Výstaviště Praha, a.s.
Dopravní podnik hl. m. Prahy
TYRŠ The Human Lab
Elpida
Botanická zahrada Přírodovědecké fakulty UK
Fakulta umění a designu UJEP
Hellichovka (VOŠ a SPŠ grafická)
International network
Futures, the European Photography Platform
Media partners
A2, Art & Antiques, ArtMap, Artalk, Artyčok.TV, Český rozhlas, Flash Art, Swarm Mag