HUNT KASTNER

Portals is the first presentation in the Czech Republic of Berlin-based Peles Duo, founded in 2005 in Frankfurt (originally as Peles Empire) by Katharina Stöver and Barbara Wolff. Their site-specific installation at Hunt Kastner introduces the core interest of Peles Duo’s practice: photography and the copy, their material transformation and encounters with mythology and history. Through its central character, the Goddess Cybelle, the exhibition articulates Peles Duo’s concern with a more nuanced understanding of female historical figures. Cybelle’s hybrid and shifting form allows for an unfolding of the work, interconnected with different parts of time, memory and space with multiple entry and exit points. In the new paintings and with the premiere of the film Ashes Within You (2026) – a collaboration with artist Rob Crosse – the exhibition questions hierarchy and authorship, where ‘portals’ enable an ongoing transformation.

The group exhibition Words of a Poem Should Be Like Glass focuses on glass as a material and as a symbolic phenomenon. It presents artists of different generations who work with its materiality from various perspectives and through different media. Glass is understood here not only as a traditional artistic material with deep roots in the Czech environment, but also as a carrier of specific properties such as transparency, fragility, and reflection, which open up broader considerations of visibility, space, and perception. The exhibition follows on from the annual program of the Hunt Kastner, which presents a selected theme in a broader context through thematically defined group projects.