Sidliste (Housing Estate) – Artworks in English
Street For Art
2009–2012
Between 2009 and 2012, a one-of-a-kind cultural festival unfolded in Chodov and Opatov, bringing contemporary art, architecture, and community projects into the heart of the housing estate. Each year explored a different intervention in public space, opening up fresh ways to use it and fostering a closer connection between residents and their surroundings. A standout event was the Berlin collective Raumlabor’s temporary inflatable architectural installation, which became a hub for meetings, discussions, and community activities. Other projects introduced short-term interventions that reshaped how people spent their leisure time among the panel buildings. The festival showed that even the sprawling environment of a large housing estate can be transformed into a lively space for cultural and social life, while making a significant contribution to the conversation about the design and use of public space in South City.
Sylva Francová
InPanel
2010
The project draws inspiration from the housing estate environment in Prague, where the artist has spent most of her life. She was captivated by how the panel buildings come alive at night, their flickering lights offering fleeting glimpses into interiors otherwise hidden behind the monolithic concrete walls. Her focus is on how residents inhabit these standardized apartments — how sameness and difference coexist, how the rhythmic repetition of architectural elements contrasts with the intimacy of private life within, set against the anonymity of the exterior. Sylva Francová maps the living rooms of neighbors, friends, and acquaintances in the panel houses of South City, presenting these interiors as individual, self-contained capsules of human experience. Side by side yet divided only by a thin wall, they form a compelling portrait of coexistence within a panel housing “anthill.”
Zbyněk Baladrán
157.74m2 Optimal apartment in KOLDOM , 4‘20‘‘
2006
The “Optimal Apartment” in the Litvínov KOLDOM (collective house), spanning 157.74 m², embodied the utopian vision of ideal living in the 1950s. It combined generous private spaces with shared facilities designed to simplify daily life and reshape how people lived. This model highlights the striking contrast between the ambitious ideals of modernist architecture and the reality of later panel housing developments, where both privacy and space were dramatically reduced.
CONVICT (Conrad Eric Armstrong & Viktor Valášek)
Háje I (Fountain)
Háje II (Dolphins)
Háje III (Flower)
2025
The artistic duo CONVICT brought their painting practice from the streets into the former Galaxie cinema to create three site-specific works directly inspired by the environment of South City. A defining feature of their work is field-based practice—painting in places that bear traces of community life and engaging directly with the people who inhabit them.
The paintings were created during plein-air sessions at more than twenty locations across the housing estate. The artists incorporate fragments of public space, found objects, and stories of local residents into their works. Their canvases reflect the everyday life of the estate—the movement of people, the atmosphere of specific corners, and seemingly insignificant details that often go unnoticed.
The project is not merely a documentation of the urban landscape but also a gesture of re-discovering the value of an environment often perceived as ordinary or inhospitable. Through painting, CONVICT opens space for pause, dialogue, and shared experience, presenting South City as a living and inspiring environment.
Vladimír Študent, Vladimír Charvát
South City Central Park
Study (served as the basis for the creation of the existing terrain models)
1986
In the mid-1980s, the Prague Project Institute commissioned the then-emerging artists Vladimír Študent and Vladimír Charvát to develop a conceptual design for a park in South City, between the Háje and Opatov metro stations. A key requirement for the park was to incorporate two large “hollows” of spoil (excavated during the metro construction), totaling 97,000 m³, while also respecting the metro structure and the somewhat awkwardly placed utility networks.
At the time, their design was regarded by experts as a progressive contribution to garden and landscape design. The proposal for the central park, along with other works by Vladimír Študent, was exhibited as part of the Urbanita event organized by Benjamin Fragner at the Fragner Gallery in Prague. However, only a relatively small portion of the design—the land art component—was realized. The artists’ goal was to create a pleasant space for residents to meet and relax while maximizing the park’s connection to the network of pedestrian paths throughout the newly built South City. The artistic expression of the park was of fundamental importance: it was intended to be visually engaging both from the perspective of visitors on the ground and from the views from the upper floors of surrounding buildings.
Patricie Fexová
Housing Unity
1999
An authentic cutaway of a student dormitory building in Prague’s South City. Each room is photographed and positioned according to its actual location, revealing the internal structure of a building inhabited by several hundred people.
Ládví Group
Original mosaic panels from the Ládví housing estate
(saved during their replacement in 2007)
Postcards
2007
Ládví Group was a Czech art collective founded in 2005 by Adéla Svobodová, Jiří Thýn, Tomáš Severa, and Jan Haubelt. Their work does not focus on traditional art forms, but rather on community- and site-specific activities that intervene in the everyday space of the housing estate and reflect the living conditions within it. Their projects included Pruning the Bushes (removing shrubs that obscured a sculptural relief), Ládví Views (placing artist-designed postcards featuring the housing estate in a local newsstand), and Chalk Stand on a playground, which allowed residents to create art in the surrounding environment. Ládví Group exemplifies art that emerges from local experience — connecting aesthetics with activism and demonstrating that even small gestures in anonymous public spaces can raise questions about community, belonging, and the identity of people living in dense housing developments.
Ládví Group was a Czech art collective founded in 2005 by Adéla Svobodová, Jiří Thýn, Tomáš Severa, and Jan Haubelt. Their work does not focus on traditional art forms but on community- and site-specific interventions that engage with the everyday spaces of the housing estate and reflect the living conditions within it. Their projects included Pruning the Bushes, which involved removing shrubs that obscured a sculptural relief; Ládví Views, placing artist-designed postcards featuring the housing estate in a local newsstand; and Chalk Stand at a playground, allowing residents to create art in the surrounding environment. Ládví Group exemplifies art that emerges from local experience—connecting aesthetics with activism and showing that even small gestures in anonymous public spaces can provoke reflection on community, belonging, and the identity of people living in dense housing developments.
Tomáš Svoboda
Minimal Apartment
2007
The theme of minimized living space was a prominent subject for avant-garde artists of the 1920s and 1930s. The concept of a “minimal apartment” was first realized by Karel Teige in 1932 on a proposed floor plan of just 9 m².
Artist Tomáš Svoboda presents his own list of currently owned personal belongings, adapted so that they would fit into such a minimal apartment.
Kurt Gebauer
Minikrajina Ostrava-Fifejdy
1980–1985
Mini-Landscape Ostrava-Fifejdy is a unique children’s playground located in the middle of the Fifejdy II housing estate in Ostrava, created as an experimental project by the academic sculptor Kurt Gebauer. The artwork was developed between 1980 and 1985 under challenging urban and economic conditions.
Gebauer conceived Mini-Landscape as an art piece integrated into the landscape, where playground equipment merge with sculptural objects. It utilizes the uneven terrain of a former sandpit, shaped into functional artificial forms such as hills, an amphitheater, an artificial water cascade, and more.
The photographs capture children playing in the unfinished terrain of the emerging “mini-landscape” in close proximity to the panel buildings — “in which people were already living, even though work around the buildings was still ongoing.” Some children helped with the construction while simultaneously testing the durability of individual elements through play. The objects of Mini-Landscape have undergone several reconstructions, particularly the wooden components. Currently, after a five-year gradual reconstruction, Mini-Landscape is being preserved. This unique mid-1980s project has been nominated for inclusion on the list of protected cultural monuments.
Architects Jiří Mojžíš, Martin Rajniš, and Luboš Jíra collaborated with Kurt Gebauer on the Mini-Landscape Ostrava-Fifejdy project.
Kateřina Šedá
Different Strokes for Different Folks
2007
The original idea for the project emerged from the renovation of panel buildings in the Brno-Líšeň housing estate, which involved collaboration with several architects. However, none of them considered the estate as a whole, treating each building individually, so “the housing estate looked like a sampler of various types of buildings.” The artist obtained the main building types from the architects and arranged them side by side to give the impression that each building came from a different place. She then multiplied the main patterns on a canvas and had a thousand shirts made from it. Next, she compiled a list of residents’ names (copied from the doorbells of the buildings), from which she selected a thousand families and paired them.
Identical packages containing a shirt were mailed to each paired family, always listing the opposite family as the sender. In this way, each pair of families symbolically shared a common object. This simple procedure also created the potential for direct contact between the families.
The project culminated in an invitation to the vernissage at the Moravian Gallery in Brno, which included a display of the pattern featured on the shirts.
Eva Jiřička, Eva Koťátková and the Háje population
Non-Place – Háje
Intervention / public space situation
2025
The project focuses on exploring “non-places” — the in-between spaces we encounter in our everyday movement through a public space. These are areas people merely pass through, seemingly purposeless places where we disconnect from our surroundings and immerse ourselves in our own thoughts. Yet these spaces hide unexpected potential for exploring human experience as well as individual and collective imagination.
The artists ask whether it is really necessary to fill non-places or in-between spaces and assign them a function. What alternative dynamics might they offer for our presence in public space? Non-places are areas where people can remain anonymous and where no deep social relationships exist. This space exists between the “places” where we live and the “non-places” we merely pass through. Non-Place – Háje embodies both of these aspects. The project is based on field interviews with people who passed through the site as a non-place.
Tomáš Džadoň – Panelák
Panel Building
2009
Džadoň’s architectural works reference the historical and political changes of post-communist Central Europe and explore questions related to finding one’s identity in relation to tradition, whether older or more recent.
In the project Panel Building, the artist deconstructs the walls of a pre-frabricated panel structure, offering the possibility of perceiving the apartment block almost like a children’s construction set — a kind of model house. In his interpretation, this aesthetic “building set” has real-life dimensions, including detailed windows and balconies.
Tomáš Džadoň – Památník lidové architektury
A Monument to Folk Architecture
2009
The work A Monument to Folk Architecture is based on the contrast between two cultures. Traditional wooden log houses are placed atop a panel building, turning the apartment block into their pedestal. This absurd juxtaposition links socialist ways of life with folk traditions. Džadoň returned to the theme several years later in a project of the same name, in which he successfully installed log houses on the roofs of panel buildings in the Košice housing estate (Monument to Folk Architecture, 2013).
Tomáš Ruller
Performance 8.8.88
1988
This photograph captures a moment from a performance that took place in the Opatov housing estate in Prague in 1988.
Artist Tomáš Ruller greeted visitors in front of the closed Culture Center during the vernissage of an exhibition that never actually opened (it had been officially banned). He then handed them blank sheets of paper, which he had prepared for the exhibition installation, and asked them to follow him. He led them through the housing estate to an abandoned concrete plant, where plaster and colored pigments had been staged. Along the way, he pasted the sheets of paper in random locations, as if installing his exhibition in the public space of the periphery. The performance itself took place inside the former concrete plant. Ruller emptied bags of plaster onto a pile, fell into it, and rolled in it, leaving white traces on rusted pipes. He hung from a rusted structure, climbed a pile of gravel, and scattered the remaining papers around the bleak surroundings. The performance reached its climax when he poured flammable red paint over himself and set it alight, then fell with outstretched arms into a large puddle, emerging completely covered in mud. He then lifted a rusted structure onto his back and carried it up a small hill overlooking the housing estate. Accompanied by Leoš Janáček’s Glagolitic Mass, the performance concluded with refreshments and wine, as is customary at exhibition openings.
Photograph by Hana Hamplová.
Viktor Kopasz
City.zen – South Block
2011–2012
The work City.zen – South Block is part of a larger series — an artist’s book that collages motifs from the South City housing estate. The photographic material is rearranged into flexible configurations, allowing the book to be explored nonlinearly in multiple directions.
The related project Video Book Proposal / City.zen (see QR code) interprets the original artist’s book, breaking free from the fixed structure of the series of photographic albums the author has been creating over time. The content of the book integrates orientation markers by graphic designer Jiří Rathouský, whose pictograms serve the author as graphic elements linked to image fragments of South City panel buildings.
Jiří Rathouský
Graphic Symbols for the South City II Housing Estate
1976–1984
The prominent typographer and graphic designer Jiří Rathouský (1924–2003) is responsible for a number of now-legendary graphic works, including projects for the Prague Metro, the House of Housing Culture, and the Intercontinental Hotel. The construction of panel housing estates as a new type of residential unit brought with it a negative effect: disorientation. The similarity between panel buildings and the large distances between them contributed to considerable confusion in these neighborhoods. This problem was addressed for the first time during the construction of Prague’s South City II housing estate.
The estate was divided into six residential clusters — natural units — which were to be complemented by thematic and symbolic elements representing the sun, water, earth, air, fauna, and flora. Rathouský worked with an abstracted human figure and references to Czech history in his graphic design. The chosen colors reflected the affiliation of each cluster within the estate. For each thematic cluster, Rathouský defined a primary color based on specific symbolism. Rathouský’s orientation system for South City II included both monumental signage for long-distance visibility and smaller architectural elements. The comprehensive identification system also featured large-scale maps and directional signs, marking boiler rooms, healthcare facilities, kindergartens, and small commercial centers (with identity-based names such as Sunflower or Rose).
Although the orientation system for South City II was not fully completed due to interruptions in construction after the post-November 1989 modifications, the realized portion remains one of the most comprehensive and long-lasting graphic design projects in architecture.
Magdalena Jetelová
South City
1983
In 1983, artist Magdalena Jetelová developed a concept for a new park landscape that — thanks to a second underground level — doubles the usable area for both the panel buildings and the park intended for residents of the housing estate.
The upper, sculpted part of the landscape/park is designed for recreation and leisure activities. As visitors walk through this area, they encounter sculptures, sculpturally modeled entrances, and access paths leading to the lower level. This lower level is intended for various sports and other leisure activities, but primarily functions as a garden center.
Glass connecting elements between the upper landscape, the underground garden center, and the high-rise buildings are meant to stimulate imagination through play and surprise. The newly designed landscape is intended to evoke curiosity and activity, thereby integrating the residents of South City. By engaging people with the architecture, movable elements, and the changing appearance of the garden center depending on the weather, the space becomes more human-centered.
Although this conceptual transformation of South City was never realized, it can be traced in numerous drawings, models, and digital simulations by the artist — including the film presented here.
Fuczik and residents of the housing estate
Háje Housing Estate Project
2025
The participatory Háje Housing Estate Project was developed during the summer months of this year. Invited respondents — permanent residents of the Háje housing estate — answered a questionnaire about their daily lives and specific locations within the estate. They were also asked to document these places with their own photographs or drawings.
The aim of the project is to present concrete locations and environments in the housing estate that residents feel personally connected to and interact with on a daily basis. Another dimension of the project is to engage local residents and give them the opportunity to become part of an exhibition focused on the environment in which they live.
The Háje Housing Estate Project is open to anyone who is currently a permanent resident of the estate. Participants simply fill out the questionnaire and document specific locations. Their responses will be exhibited for the duration of the show.
Contact: ondrej@umeleckestrevo.cz
Krištof Kintera
How Can I Help You?
In his site-specific installation, How Can I Help You?, Kintera extends his sustained inquiry into the poetics of terminology, turning his gaze toward the precarious cartography of human affect, need, and psychic condition. Conceived as a monumental bar composed of more than three thousand glass vessels—each inscribed with the name of a distinct feeling, mood, desire, or impulse—the installation materializes as a spatially choreographed inventory of the human psyche, while simultaneously offering itself as a mapping of the collective emotional landscape of our present moment.
The work continues Kintera’s broader artistic engagement with language: its strata of meaning, its porousness, its power to render visible that which remains unseen yet is intensely experienced. Here, language emerges as a translational device—like art itself—through which the ineffable is given form, enabling us to examine and share the contours of our inner life: what burdens us, sustains us, or propels us forward. The installation posits art as a medium capable of articulating and projecting interior states in relation to a mutable, often destabilizing world. How Can I Help You? unfolds as an awe-inducing, illuminated psychological laboratory—a site of introspection and collective attunement. The viewer encounters a spectrum of psychic ingredients—936 in total—each drawn from the intimate lexicon of daily life: joy, sorrow, anticipation, frustration, love, exhaustion. With irony tempered by empathy, Kintera reflects the fragile oscillations and accumulated pressures of our mental existence—offering, in essence, a map of the cosmos within.
Unique Sacred Cultivation Cooperative
Cash Desk
Installation for the Galaxie Cultural Station, 2025
The artistic collective Unique Sacred Cultivation Cooperative (CZ: Jedinečné svatopěstitelské družstvo) has conceived a visual design for the cash desk at Galaxie, transforming it into a portal to the analog age of cinema. The installation evokes the era of videotapes and video rental stores, wistfully reflecting on the vanished world of communal film experiences in the wake of the rise of home entertainment. VHS or Betamax?