Within the rapidly shifting cultural geography of Prague – with some institutions emerging (like Kunsthalle Praha) and some stopping it’s existence (like trend-setting Polansky gallery) – KODL Contemporary has recently emerged as a strikingly articulate institutional presence. Located on Pařížská street, its fully transparent two-storey glass architecture functions less as a neutral exhibition container than as a kind of optical interface with the city itself — a display system in which visibility is constantly reciprocal. It is within this specific architectural and editorial condition that Timeline unfolds: a group exhibition curated by Nicolas Bourriaud in collaboration with curator Barbara Lagie, and developed as one of the most conceptually ambitious propositions yet presented by the space.

Rather than operating as a conventional thematic exhibition, Timeline reads as a curatorial attempt to construct a model of perception under planetary conditions and to think art through planetary scales, ecological entanglements, and shifting ontologies of the “global”. Its starting point is unexpectedly historical: the figure of French philosopher, writer and anarchist Élisée Reclus, who effectively invented what can now be understood as geo-history — a way of thinking in which geography ceases to be a backdrop for human action and becomes an active historical force in itself. In his writings, the Earth is not a stage but a co-author of events; history becomes legible only when read through terrain, climate, and ecological transformation. This idea finds a crucial visual relay in the relatively little-known drawings of František Kupka, produced in relation to Reclus’s L’Homme et la Terre, where geography begins to dissolve into abstraction and diagrammatic thinking. This almost archaeological gesture lies at the centre of the exhibition: these images function as epistemic triggers — early attempts to visualize geography as lived history, and history as a geological force.

From this historical axis, the exhibition unfolds as a polyphonic system of fourteen artistic positions, each engaging, in different registers, with the collapse of distinctions between landscape and subject, body and environment, time and scale. The show expands into a contemporary field structured around what might be described as four intertwined regimes: relational space, deep time, totalising systems, and planetary symbolism. Yet these are not presented as theoretical categories; they are embedded in the works themselves, which operate as perceptual instruments rather than illustrations. In this sense, Timeline resonates strongly with the current urgency of the Anthropocene, where the very categories of individuality, historical agency, and even bodily sovereignty appear increasingly unstable. One recognises here echoes of Bourriaud’s earlier curatorial and theoretical trajectories — from his reflections on postproduction and relational aesthetics to his biennial projects in Istanbul and Taipei, where questions of geopolitical scale, shared commons, and planetary imagination were already central. Yet in Prague, these ideas feel less like a manifesto and more like an atmospheric condition: diffused across works, slowed down, redistributed into a field of perception rather than argument. Bruno Latour reminds us that living beings do not occupy the position of an external environment: they are materially entangled within Earth systems. This proposition resonates throughout the exhibition, where works appear less as representations of the world than as forms of participation in its ongoing processes. In this sense, the works function as instruments of recording and translation. They transform physical, biological, and informational dynamics into perceptible forms. 

In Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil’s practice, celestial and historical coordinates are reconfigured into devices that overlay astronomical mapping with geopolitical memory, producing images in which time itself becomes stratified and politically charged. Caroline Corbasson’s works operate at the opposite threshold: image-making is reduced to near-immaterial traces — graphite, dust, light deposits. Here, perception is not a window onto the world but a fragile residue of contact with it. What is shown is not representation but the very condition of visibility. Marguerite Humeau extends this logic into speculative biology, constructing evolutionary fictions in which life is no longer given but designed as hypothesis. Her ecosystems are not depictions of nature but experimental models of emergence, where intelligence, organism, and myth overlap. The works behave like seismographic devices, registering and slightly reconfiguring the energetic conditions they expose. They are not passive surfaces but active milieus of transformation.

This dynamic is materially articulated in Bharti Kher’s accumulative structures, where surfaces are formed through repetition, sedimentation, and the slow aggregation of fragments. In contrast, Patricia Dominguez, Charles Avery, and Suzanne Treister construct epistemological systems — fictional cartographies, ritual diagrams, technoshamanic maps, speculative knowledge architectures — that do not describe reality but produce conditions under which it can be thought otherwise. Bianca Argimón, Alex Cherveny, and Vern Dawson generate dense pictorial fields where symbolic regimes collide without resolution. Romain Bernini dissolves figuration into atmospheric continuity, where bodies and environments share a single perceptual substance rather than a hierarchical separation.

Katja Novitskova performs a decisive shift by extracting images from biological and computational databases and materialising them as objects. In this translation, data ceases to be informational abstraction and becomes physical presence — a reversal of representational logic that reveals the material infrastructure of the digital itself. One of the most interesting artists of her generation in Latin America, Chilean artist Patricia Dominguez, in another register, constructs on her drawings and collages hybrid ecologies where organisms, ritual systems, and technological knowledge form entangled communities. Belarus-born Berlin-based Jura Shust, famous for his interpretations of Slavic sacred rituals, meanwhile, articulates ceremonial gesture and infrastructural coding as parallel systems of transmission, where memory is both technical and mythological.

What the exhibition stages, more implicitly than didactically, is a crisis of scale. Human presence is no longer the measure of the world but one layer among many competing temporalities — geological, microbial, computational, mythological. The “landscape” becomes a field of competing intelligences, and artistic practice becomes a way of navigating these overlaps rather than representing them. The result is not a unified thesis but a carefully orchestrated drift between regimes of time and perception. From stardust to submarine fibre-optic cables, the exhibition traces he geological materiality of media — a continuum in which matter, infrastructure, and information circulate across scales. These flows generate what might be called a non-visible geography: a field composed of power structures, symbolic systems, cosmologies, and technical infrastructures. The show of artworks on view itself becomes readable as a complex system of local fluctuations. Seen through this lens, Timeline does not aim to reveal a hidden order of the world. Instead, it renders perceptible a series of micro-events within planetary circulation. Each work functions as a local node within a larger system of transformation, participating in the metabolism of matter, energy, and information. The passage through the exhibition is therefore not linear. It is a sequence of perceptual thresholds: each work subtly reorganises the conditions under which the next can be seen. What is at stake is not representation, but a reconfiguration of the very field of the visible.

This is where Bourriaud’s curatorial language finds its most compelling expression: in the refusal of singular narratives and the embrace of conceptual multiplicity. The exhibition operates like a slow machine of translation between different ontological registers — from deep time to symbolic systems, from ecological entanglement to speculative cosmologies. Yet unlike the often dense theoretical frameworks that accompany such discourse, here everything is filtered through the exhibition’s spatial condition: the transparency of the building, its exposure to the street, its constant negotiation between interiority and urban flow. Timeline feels less like a thematic group show than a provisional model of how contemporary art might think under planetary pressure. It does not resolve the tension between human scale and planetary scale — it makes that tension visible, almost inhabitable. And in doing so, it confirms Kodl Contemporary as a space that is not simply participating in contemporary discourse, but actively trying to shape its grammar.

Timeline will be exhibited in KODL Prague until June, 7th.