Queer Existence as Collective Choreography

📍 Korzo Hall of the Trade Fair Palace
Launguage accessibility: Czech, Slovak
Admission is free of charge

The two independent short films by Michal Durda and Paulina Pinková explore the concept of “queer” through social and collective choreography. The screening will be followed by a discussion with the artists, moderated by Nela Pietrová. The films address the themes of chemsex and folklore from a queer perspective, incorporating elements of storytelling, dance, and music. These are collective rituals that can be appropriated as methods of everyday rebellion. The subsequent discussion will focus on these contexts and on strategies of artistic collaboration that joyfully reclaim what a world of rigid norms and prejudices seeks to deprive us of. 

This event is organized by tranzit.cz in collaboration with the Lunchmeat Festival as part of the Lunchmeat Symposium.

Paulína Pinková is an intermedia artist and a graduate of the Performance Studio at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Brno University of Technology. Her practice straddles the boundaries between video, text-based work, and linguistic-performative experimentation. Her work is grounded in metaphorical language and dreamlike aesthetics, through which she explores themes of queer identity, collective care, and shared experience. Instead of isolated authorship, she often leans toward collective processes and the creation of safer spaces. The political dimension in her works does not come across as a declaration but rather as a solid organic thread running through both personal and community narratives.

With a clenched fist I caress your face is an experimental, student-led, queer, collaborative, fairy-tale-like, romanticized, and poetic short film. Above all, it speaks to why we might feel the urge to care for someone—or something—yet only with a tightly clenched fist, ready to punch or to defend. It is an audiovisual essay about the search for roots and the fluidity of identity as well as a nonviolent protest against the current political situation in Slovakia. It reveals an intermediate space where the freedom to exist and love outside prescribed templates is not a threat to tradition but rather its natural and unquestionable evolution.

Michal Durda (*2002, Třebíč, Czech Republic) is an emerging intermedia artist based in Brno. In his artistic practice, he focuses on the shifting canon of queer identity and intimacy, which he explores through performance and other media.

The tension between an informed narrative and provocative queer aesthetics invites us into the compelling contemporary issues surrounding nonnormative lived experience. In this way, he seeks to transcend the publicly accepted image of queerness and peek behind its facade—into the shadows of the queer.

In 2024 he exhibited an immersive installation as part of a group exhibition at the Prague Pride festival. He also performed at the Festival of Naked Forms in Lviv (2024) and Gdańsk (2025) as well as at the International Multimedia Art Festival in Novi Sad, Serbia, in 2023 and in the project Liquid Queer Memoria (2023) at Troja Château in Prague.

In 2025 he held his first solo exhibition, Kurwa Kurwie Łba Nie Urwie, at Gallery Umakart in Brno. His text “Peg the Fag: Manifesto” was published in 2025 in the anthology Proměny Maskulinit (Transformations of Masculinity). He is currently engaged in collective performative work with the group Izbová Teplota, which debuted at the Modra Kabaret in 2026, and they are currently preparing for their next performance at the MACH festival in Slovakia.

Crystaldom of Chemsex explores queer intimacy in the era of the chemical Anthropocene through the phenomenon of chemsex, with the aim of capturing its complex social and affective dimensions without resorting to moralizing or pathologizing frameworks. Crystaldom of Chemsex creates a language that allows us to speak about synthetic intimacy outside of puritanical cisheteronormative narratives. The essay film articulates a reality in which bodies, substances, and technology work as coactors shaping the experience of queer sexuality.

“The centerpiece of the exhibition is the fourteen-minute essay film Crystaldom of Chemsex, which explores the phenomenon of chemsex—the deliberate combination of sexuality with the use of psychoactive substances—and reflects on it through personal experience, expert knowledge, and a critical examination of how it is represented in the media. The project seeks to understand the relationships between intimacy, minority stress, stigmatization, and the need for closeness, without slipping into moralizing or sensationalism.”

– The Exhibition as a Space for Dialogue: Michal Durda at the František Drtikol Gallery in Příbram opens up the topic of queer communities without prejudice. Press release. František Drtikol Gallery in Příbram. June 6, 2026