In 2026, PLATO once again hosts an exhibition of the laureates of the Jindřich Chalupecký Award. This year, the international jury has honoured two artists and one art collective: Yuliya Bokhan, Tereza Kalousová and The Laundry Collective (Kolektiv Prádelna).

This prestigious prize is intended for emerging visual artists living or working in the Czech Republic, whose artistic work is regarded as exceptional by an international jury.

The work of Yuliya Bokhan offers powerful insights into existential themes such as social uprootedness and anxiety, at the same time retaining the charm of the unspoken and impressively weaving together references from across the history of painting. Tereza Kalousová’s practice inventively combines object-based work, architectural thinking, and video installation. The central motif of her work is deformation – of the body, of temporal perception, and of movement in a post-internet reality. The jury decided to award The Laundry Collective for their long-term and systematic work with socially engaged issues, in which they address the experiences of exclusion, marginalization, and poverty with a unique artistic voice.

The presentation is complemented by the exhibition Florilegium by international guest, the Swiss artist Sophie Jung, who creates sculptural assemblages from found objects and presents a cross-section of her work from recent years.

Laureates

Yuliya Bokhan (1998), a Belarusian artist who lives and works in the Czech Republic, focuses on working with space and ways of creating places where everyone can find their way to hidden content based on the images and sounds presented and their interaction with each other. Using painting, collage, video, and sound, she creates multimedia works at the intersection of painting, object, and installation, which can be intense and expressive as well as subtle and sensitive. Her works combine references to spiritual and historical motifs with personal, existential, and psychological reflection. She is interested in the tension between external and internal reality, between the self and others, and between the different layers of her own experience. Yuliya Bokhan focuses on moments that lead to misunderstanding, conflict, and the feeling that true connection is impossible. Through these themes, she explores contemporary issues of interpersonal – and even nonhuman – relationships and the search for sincerity with regard to oneself and the world.

Tereza Kalousová (1998), a visual artist and architect who works between Prague and Amsterdam, works with various media, including video, sculpture, installation, and text, reflecting on how digital technologies and contemporary economic and political systems influence our perception of our own bodies, time, and space. She is interested in limit situations, where established forms and systems cannot proceed smoothly, nor can they completely break down. She focuses on how we try to orient ourselves in such moments and what happens to the human body, to intimacy, and to language, which sometimes ceases to function. Her work is based on personal experience, which she uses as a tool to grasp broader social and systemic connections.

The Laundry Collective (Kolektiv Prádelna) is a group of women who have come together with the aim of challenging stereotypes and prejudices about homeless people. Through texts, drawings, films, and live actions, they draw attention to the reality of social exclusion and the feeling of not belonging in public spaces, which should, in principle, be accessible to everyone. They draw on their personal experiences with life on the streets and their knowledge of the systemic barriers that prevent people from living with dignity. Since 2023 the collective has been operating a mobile laundry during the summer months, offering people who don’t have access to sanitary facilities the opportunity to wash and dry their clothes. Here laundering is not a charitable service but rather a way to foster relationships and provide a temporary safe environment and space to meet. The Laundry Collective was founded in 2019. Today it consists of Balu, Helena, Linda, Monika, Daša, Magdalena, and the dog Aranka.

The jury

The international jury, consisting of Denisa Bytelová (teacher, critic, theorist, and curator of contemporary art), Anna Gritz (director of Haus am Waldsee in Berlin), Hana Janečková (curator and teacher at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague), Valentinas Klimašauskas (independent curator, author, and director of CAC Vilnius), Marika Kupková (curator, theorist, and teacher) and Maria Lind (curator and director of the Kin Museum of Contemporary Art in Kiruna) selected from 150 portfolios sent by authors presenting their work on the domestic art scene.

The exhibition is supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, the City of Ostrava, and the Prague City Hall.