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  On the Shore of the Last Sea / Na břehu posledního moře | 2026

On the Shore of the Last Sea / Na břehu posledního moře Katarína Magid Hládeková & Václav Magid 24 October – 19 November 2025 (opening 23 October 2025) NoD Gallery, Dlouhá 33, Prague 1 Curators: Marika Kupková, Pavel Kubesa The project explores camping as a paradox of modernity: it promises freedom and contact with nature, yet it reproduces social hierarchies and the stigma of Eastern European belonging, for which a trip to the seaside is a marker of prestige. At the core of the exhibition was a series of six videos in which puppets, handled by Luděk Rathouský, portray holidaymakers at a seaside campsite. Their monologues reveal the geopolitical and social conflicts that lie beneath carefree holiday life. The Seeker of the Centre of Europe compares rival calculations of the continent’s centre until the algorithm begins to offer him other “nodes”: Auschwitz, Katyn, Srebrenica, Bucha and Gaza. The Ideologue of Maritime and Inland Nations sees his picture of “good land and treacherous sea” dismantled by an afterword drawing on Kojin Karatani. The Developer (video Beach, Ethnic Cleansing and Economic Opportunities) pitches an investment in the “Riviera”; his speech is a montage of actual statements about Gaza by Jared Kushner, Donald Trump and Bezalel Smotrich. The Observer of His Own Body admires his tan and associates body hair with “the East”. The Diner is ashamed of his tinned pâté and compensates with an evening at a restaurant. Uncle Mišo, the campsite adviser, shows his neighbour how to pitch a tent and compares ways of travelling. Voices: Marika Kupková, Václav Magid, Radim Chyba, Markéta Žáčková, Štěpán Dražka and Luděk Rathouský. Costumes: Markéta Žáčková and Katarína Hládeková. Video: Ivan Svoboda. The installation was complemented by the towels Konfiskáty (2021–2025, by Katarína Hládeková, photo Eva Rybářová) and the 3D-printed weapon models Jménem nikdo (2023) by Václav Magid. The central motif is the “last sea”, whose waters are receding, and we do not know what will come next. The sea, which carried discoveries, goods and claims to world domination, has functioned in the European imagination as a boundary to be crossed. Today we look at the same horizon with the Anthropocene experience of exhaustion, and yet we still pack new swimsuits for the campsite. For landlocked people from Central and Eastern Europe, the sea is also a mirror of identity. The campsite works as a miniature Europe where who belongs where is negotiated between “the West” and “the East”. Czechness and Slovakness manifest themselves through shame and the need to compensate, while Russianness, in neo-Eurasianist ideology, defines itself as a “land civilisation” opposed to the “maritime” West. The project thus makes visible the violence and hierarchies hidden in the infrastructure of leisure and in notions of national and regional belonging.