by Carolina Sculti // Mar. 10, 2026
This article is part of our feature topic Abjection.
Abjection often conjures images of horror—filth, ugliness, death—in their most visceral, corporeal form. Yet what we tend to neglect are abject forms of the mind: a kind of psychic horror that arises from the slippery grip we have on our sense of self. This discomfort, the circling ambiguity of our personhood and the world we inhabit, is the focus of GHMP Zvon’s most recent exhibition, ‘The Double.’
The double, or doppelgänger, has captivated the human imagination for centuries, beginning with the myth of Narcissus and recurring in pop culture with figures like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, or in more recent TV series like ‘Severance.’ Our fascination with these figures arises from the tension between recognition and threat—between the self that is you and the aspects of the self that are repressed, denied or unconscious. In this case, the double functions as the abject, threatening the unity of the self and producing a sense of terror or dread.
‘The Double’, 2025-26, installation view at GHMP Zvon // Photo by Jan Kolsky
Staged at the Stone Bell House in Prague’s historic city square, the exhibition features media ranging from painting, sculpture and graphic art to photography, video and contemporary technologies. Curated by Kristýna Jirátová, the show presents works by both Czech and international artists.
The exhibition opens at the base of a spiraling staircase leading upward through three floors, each devoted to a different interpretation of doubling. The original features of the medieval building remain intact—barred stone windows, brick floors, arched doorways—while decorative striped wallpaper overlays the space, fostering a subtle, yet still disorienting sense of “seeing double.”
‘The Double’, 2025-26, installation view at GHMP Zvon // Photo by Jan Kolsky
The first work encountered is Petra Oriešková’s 1990 ‘The Friend.’ Several of her pieces appear throughout the exhibition, and her imagery often fuses surreal, nude human forms with animal counterparts. My eyes locked instantly with the woman central to ‘The Friend,’ bringing me into her bizarre landscape. What appears at first to be a mirror in front of her instead contains a seated nude figure with the head of a dog. Around her float disembodied human heads, with various erotic expressions, while another body curls in a fetal position.
The scene is unsettling on multiple registers; the animal-headed double confronts us with a recognition of the primitive—the animalistic, instinctual drives we prefer to repress and separate from our rational selves. The floating heads only deepen the unease, destabilizing our notion of bodily integrity and reality. And all of this unfolds against the backdrop of a certain eroticism, a space long linked to the subconscious, suggesting our repressed impulses may be more powerful than the orderly, coherent self we rely on.
Petra Oriešková: ‘The Friend,’ 1990 // Photo © The Prague City Gallery
Another highlight in the show is Jan Švankmajer’s 1994 ‘Here Lived and Suffered,’ shown alongside ‘She Is Somebody Else.’ Both are stereographic works that combine double-exposed, black-and-white photographs with protruding 3D elements—skin-colored clay, fur, feathers, rusty metal and wood. The images, oscillating between photograph and sculpture, stage a kind of collapse between the world of the viewer and the world of the subject.
In these photographs, two figures reach toward the camera as if grasping for us. In ‘Here Lived and Suffered,’ one figure’s hand extends out of the image as a clay appendage clutching something like a heart, except it is encrusted with feathers and sticks, as if grown from outside of the human body. In ‘She is Somebody Else,’ the subject’s face is replaced by an oversized clay head: a mask-like form with openings only for the eyes, a long fur nose and human ears.
What makes these works particularly unsettling is not only their challenge to bodily coherence or to the idea of a reasonable, socialized self, but also their disturbance of time and place. The double exposure captures two moments at once, fusing them into a single distorted instant; the combination of flat photograph and protruding sculptural elements disrupts our spatial orientation. Abjection, here, extends beyond the body and into the symbolic order itself: the coherence of time and space, alongside identity, begin to fracture.
Jan Švankmajer: ‘Here Lived and Suffered,’ 1994 // Photo © The Prague City Gallery
A contemporary manifestation of a similar disruption is present in Adam Štech’s 2024 ‘Woman with Telephone.’ The painting depicts a woman in a traditional Victorian dress, gripping a phone in her left hand. Her face, fractured and rearranged in a cubist style, simultaneously looks upward and to the side while fixating on the phone screen. Her attention, as well as our attention, is pulled in multiple directions, mirroring the fragmentation of our focus and our identity in digitally-permeated times.
Here, the fixation on the phone exposes a fast-growing and sometimes ugly part of ourselves defined by technology, desire and compulsion, positioning the phone as an extension of the body, reminiscent of the uncanny hybridity in Švankmajer’s work. At the same time, the painting juxtaposes two cultural identities: one rooted in history, art and tradition, the other defined by rapidly advancing technology and artificial intelligence. The psychological abject here emerges in the tension between these identities, producing this figure that is neither fully one nor the other—distorted, yet familiar.
Adam Štech: ‘Woman with Telephone,’ 2024 // Photo © The Prague City Gallery
Across the exhibition, the works touch this sensitive, almost defensive part of ourselves, provoking reactions of fear, repulsion and discomfort even when the works do not contain explicitly vulgar imagery. Typically, these reactions are defended by a fortress of coherence: norms that support our socially-constructed identities, our separatist attitude towards the natural world and our insistence on the linearity of space and time. But when these walls are breached and norms are broken, we face the source of our desire for such coherence and are invited to question it. The challenge proposed by abjection is to move beyond our disgust, horror and repulsion, to create space for the complexity of the self and, in doing so, confront the urge to impose order on a world which is inherently unpredictable, contradictory and incoherent.
Exhibition Info
GHMP Zvon
Group Show: ‘The Double’
Exhibition: Nov. 14, 2025-Apr. 5, 2026
ghmp.cz
Staroměstské nám. 605/13, 110 00 Staré Město, Prague, Czechia, click here for map
