The festival is not just a static exhibition but a living process that we will kick off with a series of events.
The program of the 7th Festival m3 kicks off on Sunday, June 14 at 10:00 AM with the "Dowsing – the resources we need are invisible" event at Letná, where we will search for hidden water sources beneath the city's surface alongside Martin Zetová and professional experts.
The official festival launch follows on Tuesday, June 16: first with the guided walk "Along the Line of Verticality" starting at 3:00 PM from the construction pit at Letná to Palmovka, followed by the grand opening at 6:00 PM at Café Pauza. This marks the beginning of the main program, which will continue throughout the summer in the Prague 7 and 8 districts, featuring various artistic interventions, installations, and performance events.
The festival season, enriched by an accompanying program, will run until the autumn equinox and conclude on September 22, 2026.
The concept of verticality brings together geomorphology, physics, politics, and psychology.
Verticality as movement along a vertical axis, in depth and height, in layers, through various substances. Time is also related to verticality – acceleration, deceleration, gravity, or temperature changes. In a social context, we want to become more horizontal; verticality is not desirable – it is a symbol of power structures. Within the verticality, it is also possible to consider the subconscious, consciousness, and "superconsciousness," which may not only relate to the human psyche, but also to the architecture of places.
Urban space involves the principle of layering and overlapping. Despite the subconscious desire for a more horizontal, and perhaps therefore fairer, social order, the absolute realization of this ideal plan is not possible due to geographical limitations. Our reality lies at the intersection of two dystopian models – the "horizontal housing estate" and J. G. Ballard's High Rise. In this project, we work with two opposites – a sunken pit and a skeleton towering into the sky. Both locations carry very interesting layers of memory that we want to explore and engage in critical dialogue with.
Performative Situation (realized on 16 June 2026 as part of the exhibition opening and remaining on site as an audio installation). A live performance based on the Shepard Tone — the auditory illusion of endlessly ascending tones — performed by the choir Mikrochor under the direction of Lukáš Prchal. In this work, the Austrian collective Faxen sonifies ideas of linearity and infinite growth, reflecting on the tension between perpetual expansion and its underlying sense of inevitability and exhaustion.
Faxen is an Austrian artist collective based between Linz and Vienna, working at the intersection of sound art and acoustic experimentation through performances and spatial installations. Using everyday objects, sculptural assemblages, and the physicality of sound, the group explores the boundaries between noise and music, as well as the relationship between hearing and active listening.
A spatial installation offering visions of transformation and alternative possible futures for the Nová Palmovka building’s skeleton through new, imaginative naming. Despite the current closure of certain areas to the public, these places should still be regarded as an active part of the public sphere, and their potential should be considered.
zweintopf (founded in 2006, Graz) is an artist duo consisting of Eva Pichler and Gerhard Pichler . They work on a “poetry of trivial things” and – next to site-specific installations, objects, and videos – develop ideas that are realized as art in public space or in the form of unannounced interventions.
A series of sculptural interventions engaging with the substrate of our everyday paths. In this work, the artist explores themes of instability, imbalance, the degradation of relationships between various agents, as well as different ways of mapping layers and scales within the context of the urban landscape.
Mia Milgrom is a visual artist and a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. In her work, she explores themes of human and more-than-human care and systems of support. Her spatial installations oscillate between fragile moments of disintegration and the symbiosis of individual components. By combining natural and synthetic materials, she creates unexpected relationships and alternative modes of connection.
A site-specific performance (realized on June 16, 2026, as part of the exhibition opening), in which boats act as the primary agents of communication, conveys a poetic message about the possibilities of solidarity at a moment when infrastructural connections are disrupted.
Alena Kotzmannová is a visual artist and head of the Photography 2 studio at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague. Her practice is characterized by a recurring return to themes of memory, communication, and the questioning of the perception of time. She explores these motifs from shifted perspectives and often reveals the hidden layers of situations.
The kinetic sculptural installation explores themes of uncertainty and imbalance. It contrasts them with the fundamental human need for shelter and safety, both in relation to the individual and within broader geopolitical contexts linked to the crisis of territory. Visually, the installation resembles an enlarged table beneath which one can, at least illusorily, take refuge from some of the risks of the contemporary world.
Artur Margot is a graduate and currently a doctoral candidate in the studio of Dušan Zahoranský and Pavla Sceranková at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. In his practice, which often extends into the public realm, he focuses on the boundaries between different types of spaces, their medial potentials, and political regimes. He explores subtle transitions between the private and the public, as well as between the free and the unfree.
https://www.otevrenakultura.cz/cs/artur-magrot
A multilayered speculative project straddling physical and virtual space addresses issues of development related to the construction, operation, and value of data centres and their content. It develops a narrative of exploitation and manipulation connected to the value of information, data, and their possession.
Rudolf Samohejl is a visual artist based in Belgium and the Czech Republic. His works are “sculptural situations,” whose experience is shaped by the environment itself and the interaction of the audience. In his practice, he often captures design and architectural processes and their aesthetics. He addresses the present and the future through questions related to technology, urbanization, and consumerism.
One-off performative-participatory situation (realized on 14 June 2026 in collaboration with professional water diviners) explores the theme of sensed resources and their search through the practice of expert prospecting, a form of activity associated with great responsibility as well as possible distrust. The artist here examines polarity and probes the boundaries between the beneficial and the dangerous.
Martin Zetová is a visual artist working with the media of sculpture, drawing, photography, video, and performance. In his works, which are often marked by humor, he responds to political and social developments, engages with history, and explores the role of the artist.
The 7th annual m³ Festival / Art in Space will open in June 2025. It is organized by Studio Bubec, which specializes in the cultivation of public space, in cooperation with experts from the Prague Institute of Planning and Development, the Prague City Gallery, and the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design. Since 2017, more than fifty leading Czech and foreign artists have participated in the festival.
Since its inception, it has been profiled as a demanding type of artistic intervention affecting public space. For each year, the Art Council selects curators with different concepts, working methods, and understandings of the form, role, and impact of art. They then seek out interesting locations, primarily within the capital city, which they work with in various ways depending on the specifics of the location. The purpose of the m3 Festival / Art in Space is to use the interventions of selected artists to make the public space of the metropolis more special, to bring visitors and residents of the city into contact with contemporary art, and to actively create new contexts for the place through it. The name of the festival refers to the complex nature of the event, in which permanent works organically complement action and performance interventions, tours, and workshops. Over the course of several years, it has gained a reputation as a high-quality showcase that works sophisticatedly with artistic, historical, and social contexts in the spirit of current artistic trends. Since 2023, the festival has been held in the form of a biennial.
In her creative practice, she combines various approaches – she is involved in free creation, curatorial, production, research, and cultural advocacy activities, both individually and as a member of associations, collectives, and working groups. She deals with topics related to public space, acoustic ecology, non-hierarchical cooperation, and non-growth principles in art. Through her projects, she often touches on themes of community permeability and boundaries, resilience, hierarchical roles, empathy, and, last but not least, the theme of artistic gestures spread out over time. She is currently completing her doctoral studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, is a founding member of the Offcity collective, and until July 2024 served as program director of GAMPY – Galerie města Pardubic (Pardubice City Gallery). www.160cm.me
Visual artist and educator, graduate of Jiří Příhoda's intermedia studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, where he successfully completed his doctoral studies under the supervision of Dušan Zahoranský in 2024. His work can be described as "spatial situations" most often created by objects, video, and installations. Joint projects with Matej Al-Ali, Petr Dub, and Roman Štětina explore various forms of artistic collaboration or critically intervene in public space. Moravec is a finalist of the Jindřich Chalupecký Award (2008) and the Exit Award (2009), and a laureate of the Václav Chad Award (2015) and the Gascar Prize (2017). His work is presented in both Czech and international contexts. He is involved in exhibition architecture and has been teaching at KVKTT in Hradec Králové since 2015. In recent years, he has realized independent exhibition projects Notes on Airships (KGVU Zlín, 2017), Boundaries Invisible from Above (GAFU Ostrava, 2018), and Manuport (Rudolfinum Gallery Prague, 2020), related to his dissertation Crisis of Vision. www.tomasmoravec.cz
Crisis of Vision / Architecture of Ideas and Topography of Their Realization by Tomáš Moravec
