Derelict industrial projects have long since captured the imaginations of artists and urban explorers alike, for their distinctly haunting qualities. These spaces sometimes end up becoming ad-hoc housing and free-for-all canvases, until they may be torn down to make room for new industrial undertakings. Kunsthalle Praha in Prague draws audiences into a world of such abandoned projects, through the exhibition Lunchmeat Studio: The Grief of Misfit Cathedrals. The exhibition is on display through January 14, 2024, and invites audiences to ponder the aesthetic value of decay, along with the socio-economic forces that lead to the creation of these spaces.

The Grief of Misfit Cathedrals is shown at Aw! Lab, which is housed inside Gallery 3 at the art museum, and caters to new media art projects. Upon entering the art gallery, audiences witness an audiovisual installation spread across several walls, directed by Jakub Pešek of the independent audiovisual artist collective, Lunchmeat Studio. Members of the art collective travelled across the Czech cities of Prague and Kladno to create precise 3D scans of several abandoned industrial projects, and the audiovisual art that forms the centrepiece of the exhibition is a composite synthesised from these scans. The Grief of Misfit Cathedrals is curated by Iva Polanecká, project manager and curator, Kunsthalle Praha. She joins STIR to explore the exhibition’s inspiration, and its connection to the Czech Republic.

The exhibition is closely informed by the Japanese concept of mono no aware, translating to the pathos of things. Mono no aware speaks to an awareness of the impermanence of objects, and of finding beauty and wistfulness in their transience. For Lunchmeat Studio, the transformation and erosion of an industrial landscape seems to have evoked this sentiment. Quoting Pešek from a press release, “We don’t want viewers to understand the exhibition as showing the ruins of post-industrial buildings. Instead, we would like them to really think about what they find beautiful, what deserves to be preserved, and to what extent it is necessary to renovate the remains of something that humans have already once created and that has subsequently, within a century, become a ruin of sorts.”

In conversation with Polanecká, we learn that Lunchmeat studio has rented an industrial hall in the derelict Poldi steel works factory in Kladno, one of the cities the art collective explored for the exhibition. Lunchmeat has occupied the abandoned factory for several years, organising Till the Last, an audiovisual art event every year. The curator tells STIR, “This was one of the impulses that led to the creation of this joint project—the desire to explore this environment intensively and to bring the specific genius loci to a wider audience.”

Polanecká highlights a desire to conserve industrial spaces that were 3D scanned, as being another key motivator behind The Grief of Misfit Cathedrals. She tells STIR, “Realistically, these particular industrial areas are not completely accessible. At the moment, a diverse range of investors and developers own them, stopping up, demolishing, remodelling, leaving the different parts inaccessible.”

Regarding the exhibition’s association with the Czech Republic, both the cities explored for the art exhibition saw extensive infrastructural growth in recent years. This was undertaken by Communist authorities, while the former nation of Czechoslovakia was a member of the Warsaw Pact. Kladno, in particular, saw many housing and industrial projects undertaken by Russian authorities. However, discussing this with the curator reveals a longer, richer history of industrial transformation. Using the aforementioned Poldi factory as an example, Polanecká tells STIR that a large part of the complex was built in 1889 (before the formal existence of Czechoslovakia). In 1945, under a government programme, Czechoslovakia saw widespread industrial nationalisation, and the factory became part of the newly created national enterprise ‘United Steelworks.’ Subsequently, during the Communist era, a drastic reconstruction took place, radically altering the architectural landscape of the industrial complex. Finally, privatised after the dissolution of the Soviet Union (1991) but has largely fallen into disrepair since then. Polanecká tells STIR, “The project does not refer specifically to the period during the communist regime, but rather reflects the consequences of the fall of the complex during privatisation and the onset of gradual entropy along with the dynamic transformation.”

Kunsthalle Praha’s offering is an engaging example of conservation and revitalisation attempts being carried out through technology, and how such projects intersect with new media art. The exhibition leaves audiences pondering the immense pathos of architectural forms that were not created for aestheticism, but through their histories and transformations have, nonetheless come to acquire a sense of grandeur, as modern, urban ruins.

Lunchmeat Studio: The Grief of Misfit Cathedrals is running from October 10 2023 - January 19 2024 at Kunsthalle Praha.