CT / Gallery / Martins Kohout: Leaving the house with an open fire, but briefly

Martins Kohout’s solo exhibition at MeetFactory Gallery, Leaving the house with an open fire, but briefly, is a study in orientation within a world that is interconnected yet elusive. Kohout explores contemporary forms of solitude and sharing, and how global communication reshapes our relations to time, space, and ourselves. Foregrounded are various transitional states or “gaps” in the form of waiting, stalling, scanning for a signal – and the experience of these in threshold spaces, long corridors, and windows understood as interfaces that frame our gaze. In Kohout’s terms, the “gap” is a deliberately engineered spatiotemporal interval – not a void, but a device in the dramaturgy of attention. In the exhibition it reads as a purposeful pause that slows the flow of information, temporarily arrests action, and allows the viewer to re-orient between inside and outside. It produces the feeling of having arrived somewhere ex post – just after the conclusion of an action we had only sensed – leaving us with fragments of what that action might have been. It is equally possible we never find out, which is intentional: it lets contradictory affects – affinity and loneliness, access and impasse – coexist, so that meaning crystallises only in this very delay.

The title Leaving the house with an open fire, but briefly names a liminal situation central to Kohout’s practice. We step “outside” (into public/online space) while leaving an open fire burning inside – that which binds us and simultaneously demands our supervision in the form of attention, memory, and risk. Here the “open fire” is a wobble on the threshold between interior and exterior, between privacy and the network, between solitude and sharing. The title condenses Kohout’s themes of impasse, of “windows” as interfaces, and of the need to orient within an information-saturated world. It is not an escape or a solution, but a conscious framing of a state in which we must go out and at the same time take responsibility for the “fire” that remains within.

The exhibition’s striking architecture (developed with Sofie Gjuričová and Adam Rýznar) stages entry as a choice: we may decide whether to pass through doors with peepholes that obstruct the usual view into the gallery – or not. The space is shared by a wall vinyl pointing to a larger future project, recalling the fate of Martha, the last specimen of the now-extinct passenger pigeon – an emblem of extreme loneliness whom we cannot in fact see here, since for unknown reasons her taxidermy is “currently not on view.” A long, austere corridor follows, where visitors may stray into a dead-end space (a gap) with a chaining, polyphonic earworm empathetically calling “a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend, were sitting in a room together” – a continuation of the refrain from the performance Still there, more less, or not – culminating in cold blue light. In the next room, the video Driving Fast Nowhere. Down. Down. Down. addresses our visual overload, apathy, and fascination with catastrophic imagery in the media, paralleling sites of collapse and plunge as spatiotemporal fissures whipping past in a never-ending loop. A row of chipboard booths hosts Stye, a series of small photographic objects – prints on wooden boxes with motifs of 3D-scanned moments from the Athens flea market, mostly toy arrangements often looking “into the camera” and waiting, melancholically, within their own existential gap for a possible yet improbable rescue. The video installation A guided tour through Glare, and then everything stayed the same is a self-reflexive guided tour delivered as a performative dialogue that is at once a monologue and a test of how voice, description, and memory frame the image. A medium-specific “lesson in attention” emerges, shifting our gaze from the finished work to its situation and time – from a period of silence and isolation to the architecture of the site, and to how the video “window” functions as an interface between space and perception. Partly “falling into” it is a metal object with ribbons in the shape of a chandelier, which formed part of Kohout’s performance at the National Gallery in 2023 and, within the exhibition, materialises a reduced memory of that event through viewers who carry an actual recollection of it. The final room is scenographically staged as a “set” for pictorial situations that revolve around a window set into a roof-truss skeleton. The new video of mechanical crows in flyover, Grumpers (Late to The Joke), is more a situation than a film that demands a singular starting point. A solitary robo-crow appears as a functional relic of its former self, yet still affords the unique situation of observing a crow in a window without disturbing it. The video simultaneously recalls a static record of a similar scene, switching by cut between presence and absence – a peculiar kind of birdwatching staged within the gallery.

Here, meaning does not resolve but emerges in a steered gap: between entry and exit, between the image’s window and the gallery space, between sharing and solitude. We step “outside” only briefly – aware that the fire inside keeps burning, and that our attention and responsibility remain with it.

Martins Kohout (1984, Prague) is a non-binary interdisciplinary artist and publisher; they live and work between Berlin and Prague. Their research-based practice links video, installation, performative forms, and publishing, focusing on how digital communication and technologies shape interpersonal relations, our perception of time, and contemporary forms of solitude. They studied at FAMU (Cinematography), the Universität der Künste in Berlin, and the Städelschule in Frankfurt. They founded and run the independent publishing house TLTRPreß; they collaborate with the gallery EXILE and, together with Alexandra Vajd, served as co-heads of the Photography Studio (Critical Optics) at UMPRUM. In 2017 they received the Jindřich Chalupecký Award.

Sofie Gjuričová and Adam Rýznar are a collaborative duo working at the intersection of exhibition architecture and pipe dreams.
Jackie Ess lives in the neighbourhood.
Pálma Fazakas is interested in imagining possible futures.
Ellen Yeon Kim dabbles with words and sound through comedy and tragedy whenever she can.
Dalia Maini is a nomadic thinker and obsessive writer.

Martins Kohout: Leaving the house with an open fire, but briefly
MeetFactory Gallery

30. 10. – 11. 1. 2026  
Opening: 29. 10., 18:30 | free event 

Curator: Ján Gajdušek
Architecture: Sofie Gjuričová, Adam Rýznar
Production: Nikol Hoangová
Graphic Designer: Štěpán Marko 

Special thanks to Společnost Jindřicha Chalupeckého