This summer, the historic streets and nooks of Old Brno [Staré Brno] have filled with contemporary art pieces, marking the fourteenth edition of the Brno Art Open. Titled Prophecies Fulfilled, this year’s thematic scope is wide and somewhat cluttered — much like the challenges it interrogates. Artificial intelligence is the conceptual onset, from which the curatorial narrative meanders through digital capitalism, rising inequalities and conflicts, gentrification, and climate change. Walls that remember medieval times provide a wry backdrop for the modern, often dystopian musings of the art they hold.
Previously known as Sculptures in the Streets [Sochy w ulicích], the festival transformed from a biennial to an annual event, bringing together Central European artists, enthusiasts and unsuspecting passersby. Practising what they preach, the curators clustered the works around popular routes in the historic city centre, making the viewing experience as inclusive as possible. The majority of the pieces stem from the urban context in which they’re exhibited, combining imaginations of the times to come with nods to the past. They invite the city to cohabit with the works rather than merely contain them.
Artificial intelligence is the conceptual onset, from which the curatorial narrative meanders through digital capitalism, rising inequalities and conflicts, gentrification, and climate change. Walls that remember medieval times provide a wry backdrop for the modern, often dystopian musings of the art they hold.
Your Work Matters?
Denisovy Sady, a park overlooking Southern Brno, hosts those in need of a relaxing walk as well as shelter. Within the park, a small mural by Michal Šumichrast acts as a checkpoint guiding us towards his main work situated on the nearby Kopečna Street. Heroes and Heroines of Future Work [Hrdinové a hrdinky budoucí práce] (2026) depicts a man aiming at a sky full of drones with a homemade slingshot; smaller, statue-like figures in the foreground perform a similar movement. The bottom of the wall seems to be covered in fire, the red colour mirrored in blood-like rain dripping from the sky. Stylised slingshots and windows with shattered grass complete the composition, tying the piece to the smaller work in the garden.
The piece convincingly combines references to the infamous Heroes of Socialist Labour and gaming aesthetics. Heroes and Heroines of Future Work, both in its title and content, brings to mind an image of Alexei Stakhanov, only rather than posing with an intimidating jackhammer, the hero holds a flimsy slingshot. In this sense, it recalls the times when human effort, cherished and indispensable, acted as a promise of a meaningful life (in the most charitable reading of the Soviet award system) — a guarantee that has become obsolete. At the same time, the stylistic choices position the figures in a near-future dystopian setting, distancing the viewer who perceives them more as avatars than real people. The agency that used to be earned with productive labour gets lost. The evoked sentiments — disillusionment with the past and apprehension about the future — seem to capture the collective floating attitudes towards artificial intelligence, automation, and the future of human work in general.
What is a slingshot against a sky full of drones, what is a human mind against a digital engine?
The visual language of Šumichrast’s mural evokes that of Diego Rivera’s. However, the former artist’s work doesn’t hold the same serious, even solemn atmosphere as some of the latter’s depictions of workers. Rivera’s characters, however exhausted, are anchored in their physicality. The monumental bodies are the source of strength and collective agency. Šumichrast’s figures, reduced to avatars, appear less certain of their power as they confront an automated force which vastly exceeds them. Yet the central figure’s expression is mellow, curiously looking up at the distraught sky, perhaps inviting the viewer to gamify this supposedly miserable experience.
What is a slingshot against a sky full of drones, what is a human mind against a digital engine?
Algae, Rats, and Other Human Beings
Following the festival route, spectators come across more pieces that speak to this pessimistic and humbling truth — have people’s drive for power and control actually curbed their freedom? Locked in a park gazebo, there is Dominik Styk’s Growth Protocol [Protokol růstu] (2026), an installation made with PVC, algae, and water. A large bag acting as a self-contained body of water is spread across the floor, small bubbles filled with algae dispersed within it; fertiliser is added to some of them, while others are treated with root killer, tinting the water in the bubbles to a reddish and bluish hue, respectively.
The aquatic garden acts as a scaled-down interpretation of the human approach to a living space — it feels controlled, arbitrary, or plainly unfair. The landlord-gardener has trapped the inhabitants in disproportionately small ecosystems, additionally encouraging or diminishing their growth, with no obvious rhyme or reason. The oppressive sentiment is enhanced by the plastic PVC material holding plants and water hostage; the texture, content, and reality the piece references seem just that — artificial.
The echoes of Foucault’s biopolitics are palpable. Rather than physical space, it is life itself that is governed (or gardened): its growth, distribution, and ability to flourish. The same impulse to organise and manage the living, non-human world has produced systems which control us in turn, although their structures are increasingly elusive. It remains ambiguous who — if anyone — the fictional gardener, landlord, or decentralised government really is, and how they benefit from the situation.
Similar sentiments about the housing crisis and environmental pressures are seen in Katarína Bajkayová’s glazed ceramic relief titled Rats (2026). A building wall hosts an image of swarming rodents, their pink tails squished between the bodies. Individual animals are difficult to differentiate; to the viewer, they appear as one messy organism.
In culture and history, a rat is an extremely loaded symbol; it invokes thoughts of plague, urban decay, lab tests, but also resilience and adaptability. In their semantic multitude, rats easily become “others”, though the artist seems to suggest that humans are not unlike these animals, particularly in the setup we have created for ourselves. Our congested environment is increasingly overloaded with risks and uncertainty. Even though the rats seem perfectly at home in the systems that confine them, survival alone hardly tells us whether those conditions serve their inhabitants.
In their semantic multitude, rats easily become “others”, though the artist seems to suggest that humans are not unlike these animals, particularly in the setup we have created for ourselves.
Dreaming Up an Escape
Following the festival’s narrative, the reality of the present moment — from the economy and technology to urban governance and environmental protection — appears disordered, self-conflicted and even helpless. Vladimir Turner looks for a root cause of these problems in the common suspect — Western civilisation’s drive for growth. His Collapse [Kolaps] (2026) is an object made of hollow concrete, balanced on rusted reinforcing steel bars; it depicts a chipped-off top of a Greek column placed on an unstable, rusty iron structure.
Located in front of the antique-stylised Pavilion, the piece mirrors the fantasy on which Western culture has built itself, while at the same time disrupting it by taking away its firm foundations. The classical column, long associated with permanence, order and the authority of Western architecture, is here reduced to a precarious fragment. The form is fragile, not monumental, and the hands that have constructed it seem despondent rather than eager. The hollow concrete from which the column is made appears to emphasise the growing moral bankruptcy of the civilisation that designed it. The artist speaks to the motivations that led to the demise — development and a drive for profit at all costs; echoes of degrowth sentiments are loud.
A space opens up to imagine what should stand in place of the spent cultural foundations. Matyáš Maláč’s mural displayed in the Brno train station underpass suggests a possible approach to the conundrum. River of Eternal Protections and Actions (2026) depicts smaller panels embedded in what feels like skin folds, organic and corporeal. The illusion of depth and the vibrancy of individual scenes pull the viewer in, even though the piece is placed at a busy junction. The images invite the world of fantasy, imagination, and nature — a broken android bleeds black fluid under the table, a long green stem emerging from its fractured body; another creature forms itself from the base of a tree trunk, fluid and still undone.
The playful, open-ended nature of the piece speaks to individual creativity and intuition, which become a kind of armour or an escape from the trap of digital systems. The visual language is vaguely surrealist — oniric and engrossed in an inner landscape. Much like Surrealists who called for an imaginative emancipation from the shackles of rationality, Maláč seems to invite us to return to the self as a way of escaping the attention economy. Embracing our mind and body may nourish the creative agency in a world that necessitates consumption. Imagination, then, becomes a way of retaining the capacity to shape our reality.
