The grand opening of the exhibition
will take place on Wednesday,
September 17, 2025, at 6 p.m.

A guided tour of the exhibition
with the artist and curator Michal Koleček
will take place at 5 p.m.

The exhibition project by Ilona Németh, prepared for the House of Arts in Ústí nad Labem and titled Fragile Gardens in Adaptation, naturally continues the artist’s long-standing inquiry into the idea of the garden, explored across cultural, social, environmental, and socio-economic contexts. In recent years, this interest has been expressed, for example, through the Floating Gardens (including (Future Garden and Healing Garden), presented at documenta fifteen in Kassel in 2022, and more broadly within the large-scale international research, artistic, and exhibition project Eastern Sugar, ongoing since 2017.

Two interwoven concepts became the exhibition’s points of departure. The first grows from a site-specific permanent installation titled When we arrive here... I., which the artist realized in the Montmartre garden of the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, and which is here presented in a gallery version as When we arrive here... II. The second reflects Németh’s focused attention on the gradually vanishing row of thuja trees in her hometown of Dunajská Streda, succumbing to the mounting pressures of environmental change. Through meticulous documentation of this inexorable process—and the reuse of its traces in the form of timber—Németh raises questions connected with a critique of extensive social and economic development.

These two projects are further expanded, in the context of the House of Arts, by a newly created installation, Control Barrier, produced in collaboration with Ideal Standard s.r.o. in Teplice. Fashioned from noble, snow-white ceramic, the barriers cut across the gallery space and direct the movement of visitors. The freedom and inventiveness of artistic expression are confronted with processes of restriction, dominance, limitation, and control that we know all too well from various forms of public space. On their surfaces, marks of production disrupt both the objects’ perfection and their seemingly unshakable authority.

The exhibition is complemented by a monumental tapestry titled Crystallization Point, which records the demolition of the sugar factory chimney in Pohronský Ruskov—built in 1896—on 8 February 2024. Like many other Central European sugar factories, this one became a victim of advancing globalization and the relocation of production to regions with cheaper labor. In the book Eastern Sugar, the artist inscribed this chimney—through an artistic gesture—into a list of Slovak cultural monuments. By transforming a photographic record of the chimney’s destruction into a woven medium, Németh creates a counter-image to disappearance: a dramatic gesture of aestheticized art-industrial production.

The processual installation Spheres from Roses—composed of hundreds of blooms—together with a photograph from the 1972 Flora Bratislava exhibition, patterned ceramic tiles, and the video projection Boat, reinforce the deeply personal yet at the same time critical character of the artist’s work. They address aspects linked to family history and situate them within broader social, cultural, and environmental contexts.

In a conversation with the artist on the occasion of When we arrive here... I., Cité Internationale des Arts curator Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez remarked on Németh’s work:

“It is remarkable that you can perceive beauty, uncover something compelling or alluring where others do not. Sometimes your attention is caught by an existing, sometimes an absent structure, at other times a situation or a form. I think this manifests very intensely in your artistic practice. It seems to me that you are interested even in things that may appear to others as superfluous, insignificant to history.”