Review of ‘Timeline’ at KodlContemporary

by Jesse Slater // May 26, 2026

This article is part of our feature topic Scale.

On the top floor of KodlContemporary, Bianca Argimón’s meticulous color pencil drawing ‘Hubris’ reads like a grotesque allegory painting. Stretched across the paper’s surface, the scene encompasses detailed vignettes ranging in tone from darkly humorous to stark and brutal. A line of men in business suits run after each other. A sentient piggy bank teeters at the top of a deforested hill. A digger makes out-sized concrete sandcastles near the sea. In the foreground, from the back of a van labelled ‘ICE,’ barrels of ice cubes are relayed to a factory manned by Ronald McDonald figures with hot dog guns and fake smiles. At the product end of the factory’s assembly line, people emerge trapped in human-sized ice blocks, frozen in distressed positions as the blocks are pushed into an airplane. A missile flies towards the horizon, drawn in pale pencil, hard to see. Coffins are spat out from a water slide. Argimón’s apocalypse story is familiar. Amassed together on one plane, the vignettes play out simultaneously, pulling on the already taut thread that links these forms of violence and disintegration together. The vast scale and interconnectedness of the bigger picture is bleak.

Bianca Argimón: ‘Hubris,’ 2026 // Courtesy of the artist and KodlContemporary

Argimón’s piece is part of the exhibition ‘Timeline’ at KodlContemporary in Prague, curated by Nicolas Bourriaud with Barbara Lagie. The show deals with the incomprehensible scale of climate change, presenting works by 14 artists alongside a series of illustrations by esteemed Czech modern artist František Kupka. Kupka’s illustrations were commissioned for Élisée Reclus’ encyclopedia ‘L’Homme et la Terre,’ a totalizing piece of work first published in 1905 and meant to elucidate the history of humanity through its interactions with nature. Kupka’s illustrations are symbolistic, some with an almost mystical quality, each attempting to summarize a facet of human existence; such as progress, religion, science, the state. The contemporary works on view in the show complicate Kupka’s vision, shining a harsher, more critical 21st century light on the issues at hand, as we’ve entered the Anthropocene and our damage to the environment becomes increasingly terminal.

Group exhibition ‘Timeline,’ 2026, installation view at KodlContemporary // Courtesy of KodlContemporary

The exhibition opens with a small charcoal and ink drawing by Kupka, ‘The Rhythm of History – Wave,’ by far the most whimsical work of his in the show. Four figures are bound together in a sweeping, almost orgasmic wave, their bodies melting into each other, the tiny white dots of the cosmos smattered across the drawing’s surface. For me, it talks of beginnings and endings; the ebb and flow of humanity as our bodies come in and out of being, passed through the cycle of existence. On the opposite wall, illustrations ‘Origines’ and ‘Work’ represent our shifting existences when we’re off the wave–our lifetimes in various phases of evolution. ‘Origines’ shows primal beings and in ‘Work,’ a figure prepares a shelter with tools for hunting strewn around him. In this first room of the show, a divine connection to our environment is associated with the period outside of our lifetimes, as well as representing humanity’s removal from the natural world it once was a part of.

Patricia Domínguez: ‘Línea de Tiempo Vegetal,’ 2022-23, installation view at KodlContemporary // Courtesy of KodlContemporary

Upstairs, contemporary works take the fore, many of which wrestle with the uncomfortable and destructive pairing of our human systems and something as nebulous as the natural world. Patricia Domínguez’s watercolor painting ‘Línea de Tiempo Vegetal’ (or ‘Plant Timeline’) sees a perfect line of leaves arranged like dominoes, the first pressed gently into motion by an outstretched hand, fingernails painted bright green. The line of leaves vanishes into the distance, with the surface of the Earth arcing across darkness in the background. It speaks to control, intention, responsibility; our own incremental impacts added up to the monumental scale of environmental damage. The effect is confronting. Jura Shust’s video installation ‘Außerkörperliche Erfahrung: Wandering Spirit’ shows a person wearing a hazmat suit weaving between the regimented spruces of a Christmas-tree plantation. Again, control and extraction are at the forefront; the effects of that control are also visible, the figure wears the clothing of disaster.

Jura Shust: ‘Außerkörperliche Erfahrung: Wandering Spirit,’ 2026, ultra HD video, 5:07 min, installation view at KodlContemporary // Courtesy of KodlContemporary

Alongside the Kupka works, Patrick Van Caeckenbergh’s ‘Le Masque (Le monde à l’envers)’ harnesses Kupka’s totalizing encyclopedic style, this time assigning it to the body and anatomy. ‘Le Masque’ takes the form of a pieced-apart, restitched anatomical diagram with limbs showing skeletal, muscular or skin structures splayed out around it. It is made to be worn, eye-holes peering out from behind a relocated womb. The wearer extends their body with this “mask” that feels almost monstrous, again complicating the dynamic of man over nature; of our reasoning capabilities over our corporal selves. The encyclopedia is both blasted apart and nullified as deadening.

Patrick Van Caeckenbergh: ‘Le masque (Le monde a l’envers),’ 2015-20, installation view at KodlContemporary // Courtesy of KodlContemporary

Going back to ‘Hubris’—the epic, allegorical work I first mentioned—I consider its attempt to chronicle the present moment. Paying attention to this bigger picture, the planetary scale as it now stands, is an overwhelming feat. When I rescan the work, different details emerge; spying skeletons, a fairground ride malfunctioning, oil rigs splintering the ground. It feels a far cry from Kupka’s ordered, smoothed-over images that tell easy stories. As our impact on the planet spins out of control, the scale of disaster pushes past the capacities of our attention. Destructive intricacies are easily missed.