Between Sleep and Sprouting
Duo show with Nela Britaňáková The House Gallery
curator: Veronika Čechová
18 March – 12 April 2026
The exhibition Between Sleep and Sprouting is conceived for the threshold between late winter and early spring. It evokes a time when the surrounding landscape slowly begins to awaken, yet the buds swelling with promise on shrubs and trees may still be easily scorched by frost. It is a moment when the green tones of the first blades of grass and newly emerging leaves gradually permeate the grey-brown reality of winter’s end. Breathing in beneath the open sky, we search almost instinctively for the first subtle shift in the air—a fleeting trace of the scent of the approaching spring. Into this otherwise hopeful seasonal interval, artists Nela Britaňáková and Jindřiška Jabůrková introduce darker undertones, reflecting on how nature may transform in the future and how many of these joyful returns of post-winter greening still await us.
The old winter garden—a glazed annex continuously exposed to both light and darkness filtering through its fogged window panes—together with the outdoor terrace, staircase, and the villa’s adjacent garden forms the scenography for the artists’ own alternative “garden”: an imagined world of hybrid biodiversity permeated by the anxious atmosphere of a peculiar timelessness inhabited by surviving species. Within this dystopian garden appear artworks resembling remnants of lost architecture—a bathtub, a partially collapsed fountain—as well as shell remains, the architectural traces of molluscs, and fragments of “preserved” plants enclosed within pictorial frames. Somewhere between the human, animal, and vegetal realms lies a trapped creature, slowly twisting at the pace of a snail—at the pace of geological time. A barely breathing, shrouded figure hibernates within a concrete shelter, while ceramic and concrete objects occupy the winter garden space. In this suspended temporality and slow rigidity, the worlds of organisms and artefacts intertwine. Objects appear as if immobilised in the midst of material transformation or within a developmental stage of organic matter. The ambiguous flow of time here gestures simultaneously towards past and future, looping back upon itself in an endless cycle.
In the quiet section of the house and its surrounding exterior, a new “zone” emerges—subtly proposed by the artists—governed by a nascent and incomprehensible order. Unknown rules apply here, allowing seemingly incompatible objects, materials, and environments to intersect. Natural forms and motifs appear within hard, raw materials that resist further growth. Metal plant shoots fixed to the ceiling grow downward, forming a support for one of the few traces of a life-giving element—water. It slowly drips through a stalactite-like earthen structure beneath which an indistinct living being stretches its parched mouth in anticipation. After this initiatory, performative moment, only a material echo remains, along with moisture gradually evaporating into disappearance.
Through this environment, the artists invite us to consider whether we are prepared for such a form of natural world—one whose transformation we inevitably and actively shape through our lives in modern society. Can we allow ourselves to imagine a future in which conditions may be more hospitable to forms of existence other than human ones? And must such a transformation necessarily provoke unease, or might it also reveal the potential for new forms of development and coexistence?
Text: Veronika Čechová
Photo documentation: Tomáš Denk
Performers: Veronika Špundová, Emily Steele