CT / Gallery / Jakub Hájek & František Hanousek: Honour Glands

Honour Glands presents a large-scale installation by the artistic duo Jakub Hájek & František Hanousek. For years, the artists have cultivated a deliberate tension between painstaking hand-craftsmanship and a provisional, almost improvised aesthetic. Wood, laboriously woven wires and, above all, Tetra Pak cartons with their inner aluminium coating are assembled into intricate hybrid structures whose function remains intentionally concealed beneath overlapping layers of motifs. Exposed welds, patched joints and visible reinforcements underscore the transience of every component, transforming the space into an imagined node within an extensive piping system. No element assumes a final, static form; everything appears as a fragment of a dismantled machine or a neglected infrastructure.

A new focal point of the installation is drawing—a medium that, until now, existed as the artists’ “shadow practice”, accompanying their sculptural works and exhibition architecture. Honour Glands premieres their large-format pen-and-ink drawings, in which Hájek and Hanousek formally draw on nineteenth-century political caricature, exploiting its lapidary schematism and capacity to distil complex social conflict into a striking shorthand. Yet they do not imitate this tradition; instead they fragment and obfuscate it, creating elaborate narrative labyrinths that resist linear reading. Within these drawn scenes, resentment, grievance and latent anger accumulate against an urban-industrial backdrop. Silhouettes of factories, sewers and elevator shafts form the stage for the personal micro-dramas of individual characters.

A piping system constructed from hundreds of glued Tetra Pak cartons expands the motif of the “honour glands” from the plane of drawing into the gallery space. The metabolism of virtue may be read here as a circulation of fluid whose chemical composition remains mysterious—empty cardboard tubes serve as both physical and conceptual reminders of material poverty, while their hollowness ironically signals a deficit of the very value this vascular system purports to deliver. The artists expose virtue as a discursive phenomenon conditioned by class perspective, in which a moral ideal becomes a luxury afforded only to those with access to the “proper” resources and behavioural templates.

The installation itself may also be understood as an ongoing critique of infrastructure: the piping alludes to the networks upon which contemporary society depends. By staging these networks as provisional and leaky, Hájek and Hanousek highlight the intrinsic fragility of systems that claim universal accessibility and stability. Their metaphorical shift from “psychic woodiness” to “psychic metallicity” captures an historical rupture—the organic cohesion of pre-industrial communities is superseded by a cold metallic rationality that, under the pressure of resentment, corrodes and crumbles.

Throughout the exhibition, and in their practice as a whole, the artists deploy a pataphysical imagination—their objects and drawings evade unambiguous definitions and allow situations in which physical and social laws follow a parodied, absurd logic. The result is a work that, with intellectual rigour and ironic detachment, hybridises historical and contemporary references, obsolete technologies and new meanings. Hájek and Hanousek thus construct a complex visual metaphor of societal collapse and renewal, suggesting that neither morality nor infrastructure is fixed—both must be continually rewired, soldered and provisionally patched in order to remain operative.

Jakub Hájek (b. 1994) and František Hanousek (b. 1994) live and work in Prague and Vimperk. Both hold MFA degrees from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. They have had solo exhibitions at C. Rockefeller Center for Contemporary Arts, Dresden (2020), Holešovická Šachta, Prague (2020) and Future Suburban Contemporary, Copenhagen (2022). Their work has also featured in numerous group projects, including A.M. 180, Prague (2019); Futura, Prague (2020); Bistro 21, Leipzig; Dálava, Prague (2021); Divoká Šárka (is still alive), Prague (2021); Terén, Brno (2022); Clueless Agency, Prague (2023); Acud Galerie, Berlin (2024); Display, Prague (2024); and with the PGS collective. They have contributed to exhibition designs at MeetFactory, Prague (2023); Galerie Klatovy/Klenová (2023); and AQB, Budapest (2024).

Text by Ján Gajdušek