FANTOM

Fantom, a new site-specific installation by the Czech artist Hynek Alt, opens at the Ateliér Josefa Sudka in Prague on 11 September 2026. Conceived for the fiftieth anniversary of Josef Sudek’s death, it returns to the photographer’s studio, a modest wooden building behind a garden wall on Prague’s Újezd. The original structure collapsed and was pulled down; the building that stands on the site today, and houses the gallery, is a faithful replica. Fantom goes back to the moment just before that demolition, to the ruin at the point of its collapse, and reconstructs it as both a physical structure and a metaphysical state.

At the centre of the exhibition is a video built inside a digital reconstruction of the studio. The space was modelled from the surviving photographs of the burned building, through photogrammetry, hand modelling and texturing, so that the film holds an uncanny nearness to the very images it is made from: the same shelves, the same fallen beams and curling papers, now turned in space and seen from angles no camera ever held. It is a place assembled entirely out of documents of its own ruin, and the shift between the photograph and its rebuilt double, familiar and not, indexical and synthetic, is where the work lives.

Through this space runs a single, unbroken shot. The camera’s path is not animated by hand but generated algorithmically, and across the film it comes to inhabit a succession of different bodies, none of which is ever seen. It halts, accelerates and changes height and position without warning, so that it is never certain whose looking this is: an animal’s, a machine’s, a voyeur’s, or a ghost’s. The studio is traversed the way memory moves through a place that no longer exists, patiently, and without a body.

Alongside the video, the exhibition includes a new photographic work that returns to Sudek’s portraits of veiled faces. It takes as its starting point the male figure from Eva Krsková’s stone sculpture Milenci (Lovers, 1961), which still stands in Prague’s Stromovka, a park Sudek photographed throughout his life. Here the veiled figure appears less as a subject than as a witness: what the cloth conceals, it also keeps watch over. Made as a photograph that behaves as an object in space rather than a flat print, the image gives itself only in part and holds the rest back. The veil, a recurring motif in Sudek’s work, becomes the threshold between subject and apparition, and, on the anniversary of the photographer’s death, a cloth of mourning. Concealment becomes the condition of appearing at all.

Fantom moves along the border between archaeology and simulation, between the indexical trace of analogue photography and the spectral logic of 3D imaging. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx and on David Claerbout’s notion of the “synthetic image”, the project asks what remains when an image ceases to bear witness. It treats the past not as nostalgia but as an active, persistent layer that shapes the way we see, considering how phantoms endure as a structural condition of vision itself.