The fourth edition of the Biennale Matter of Art, entitled Necessary Wishes, foregrounds art that is born out of necessity and shaped by a reflexive, embodied engagement with the conditions people inhabit every day. The biennale is cocurated by Jaroslava Tomanová, Jakub Gawkowski, and František Fekete. All of the exhibition venues and events will be open to the public free of charge. The biennale comprises a three-month exhibition, a program of events, and long-term activities that examine forms of artistic and civic endurance, solidarity, and collective practice. The main exhibition will run from June 12 to September 13, 2026, at the National Gallery Prague – Trade Fair Palace and GAMPA – City Gallery Pardubice. The third main venue, the Tusculum Prague art center, is dedicated to an ongoing community-oriented practice that defies the three-month time frame.

The biennale includes six commissioned projects by artists Noor Abed, David Apakidze, Yana Bachynska (a.k.a. Jan Bačynsjkyj), Adrián Kriška, Aliza Orlan, and Leila Basma & Zaher Jureidini, which will be shown for the first time at the biennale alongside multiple new works. The biennale is cocurated by Jaroslava Tomanová, Jakub Gawkowski, and František Fekete, and it features forty-nine artists and collectives from Austria, Belarus, Belgium, Brazil, Czechia, Georgia, Germany, Indonesia, Iran, Kenya, Lebanon, Poland, Portugal, Ukraine, Romania, Palestine, Serbia, Slovakia, Syria, and the United Kingdom. 

The biennale further unfolds through a program comprising more than fifty events, including performances, guided tours, workshops, collective readings, music events, film screenings, and debates. The biennale seeks to develop a new approach to transcending these established formats. It engages independent initiatives rooted in the local cultural scene with the aim of developing more decentralized approaches in institutionalized art events based on trust and collaboration. The biennale also includes a space available free of charge for organized community gatherings, and a special issue of an independent magazine is being published instead of the established format of an exhibition catalogue. Additional events will take place at partner art and community venues in Prague (Shella Radio, SVĚTOVA 1, Center for Contemporary Arts Prague, and Goethe-Institut). Admission to all events and the exhibition is free of charge, so audiences can visit the biennale as often as they’d like.

The exhibition and program of live events showcase a diverse range of art collectives, community groups, and grassroots initiatives, whose varied activities are presented in a variety of formats, from installations and live events to long-term interventions. kroužek intersekce is a collective providing space for mutual learning and radical imagination. Their project The Tent takes center stage at the National Gallery, offering regular collective readings of feminist literature as well as providing space for community organizers who can book the space for free and use its equipment for workshops or group meetings, pushing the boundaries of what an art biennale can be. The word “shella” comes from Egyptian Arabic slang and means “a group of friends who do things together.” Shella Radio is a Prague-based community radio rooted in the fertile club scene but expanding into public discourse through political talk shows, panel discussions, and more. The audience is invited to join one of the live events with DJ sets or relax in Shella’s listening station at the National Gallery. Fůd is a platform for socially engaged illustration and comics. Their activities include publishing an eponymous zine, and they were commissioned to dedicate its recent issue to the 2026 Biennale Matter of Art. The zine contains visual works as well as texts by the biennale artists and curators, connected by the theme of “daily bread”—the conditions under which artists in various regions live and create and the everyday obstacles they must overcome along the way. The limited-edition magazine is available in the Trade Fair Palace bookshop. The Indonesian art-activist collective Taring Padi has facilitated the creation of protest puppets for the biennale, which were made by local participants in a workshop led by Taring Padi in Prague in May 2026. For the duration of the biennial exhibition, these puppets will be part of an installation at the Trade Fair Palace, and after the exhibition ends, they will be returned to their creators.

The biennial exhibition invites visitors to explore distinct architectural and social contexts in Prague and Pardubice. The exhibition spans the modernist Trade Fair Palace in Prague’s Holešovice district and the City Gallery Pardubice on the grounds of the revitalized Automatic Mills. Its unifying element is the architectural design of the installation by RUINA office, led by architects Adéla Vavříková and Magdalena Uhlířová. Their exhibition design draws on the aesthetics and structural solutions of construction sites and scaffolding and is based on recycling and sustainability.

National Gallery Prague – Trade Fair Palace: AntiGonna, Noor Abed, Szymon Adamczak, Željka Aleksić, Gleb Amankulov, David Apakidze, Yana Bachynska / Jan Bačynsjkyj, Jürgen Baldiga, Leila Basma & Zaher Jureidini, Rufina Bazlova / Stitch It Collective, Tina Bxtq, Michal Durda / Izbova teplota, Jan Durina, Fůd, Hana Garová, Ladislava Gažiová, Davyd Chychkan, Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven, Adrián Kriška, kroužek intersekce, Nadia Markiewicz, Shabu Mwangi, Aron Neubert, Aliza Orlan, Bronislava Orlická & Zuzana Smrkovská, Taring Padi, Cezary Poniatowski, Publik Universal Frxnd, Margaret Raspé, Nour Shantout, Shella Radio, Felipe Steinberg, Alina Sokolova, Huda Takriti, Jiří Žák

GAMPA – City Gallery Pardubice: Ștefan Bertalan, Cezary Bodzianowski, András Cséfalvay, Nosrat Karimi, Seba Kayan, Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven, Běla Kolářová, Isadora Neves Marques, Margaret Raspé, Alex Sihelsk*, Fedir Tetyanych, Liliana Zeic

Tusculum Prague: GALAS (Галас), Zoi Michailova, StonyTellers