Personal mythologies, corporeality, and the life on a balcony

The packed four-day program of the Biennale's extended Opening Weekend at the National Gallery in Prague will feature electrifying performances, a meditative collective reading session, guided tours of the exhibition with curators and artists, the launch of tranzit’s brand new anniversary book, and a compelling music selection.

The Opening Weekend of the 2026 Biennale Matter of Art will run from Thursday, June 11 through Sunday, June 14. All of the events are accessible free of charge, as is the entire biennale exhibition. Explore a selection of more the dozen program items you can look forward to at the Trade Fair Palace.

In her performance held on Thursday June 11, 7:45 p.m., Nadia Markiewicz will present the fictional character of the Lonesome Wing, a being born with a wing in place of a hand. Through delicate and lyrical choreography, the Lonesome Wing will explore unusual forms of beauty and blurs the boundaries between normality and otherness. The performace will be set in the Small Hall of the Fair Trade Palace.

Markiewicz is one of the most prominent Polish artists of the youngest generation. She works primarily with performance, video, object-based art, and installation. Her work draws on artistic research into the history of bodies that do not conform to notions of “healthy” and “normal” physicality.

The performance piece titled Looks Like a Calf at a New Door by Michal Durda and the non-hierarchical, fluid collective Izbova teplota will feature a personified bull and combine its mythological and archetypal nature with the themes of queer shame and self-acceptance.

The collective performance, set on Thursday June 11 at 8:30 p.m. in the Grand Hall of the Fair Trade Palace, will blend animalistic movements with rave choreography and authentic accounts of experiences of shame. 

Daylight All Night Long is a lecture performance hosted by transdisciplinary artist and researcher Felipe Steinberg on Friday June 12 at 3 p.m. in Hall B of the Fair Trade Palace, observing the daily life of a balcony in an unnamed southern European city.

The result of both observation and invention, it documents the flow of guests through a short-term rental apartment: Inhabited with the provisional intimacy of visitors, its occupants appear as actors passing through recurring scenes. Drawing on more than one hundred hours of recorded observation, the story traces the contemporary re-staging of totalitarianism into everyday forms.

On Saturday June 13 at 11 a.m., the grassroots community platform kroužek intersekce [krɔːʒek ɪntɜːrsektse] will hold a collective reading session at The Tent, located within the main exhibition space at the Trade Fair Palace.

Through the lens of the book Hospicing Modernity by Brazilian educator Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, the guided two-hour reading session aims to explore daily lives and patterns, and reflect on collective lived experiences. Reading the book’s chapter Prep Work 1: Who the Heck Is Modernity? in advance is recommended, but not neccessary.