Anastasiia Ilina, Hana Marhounová, Alex Švígler
We Keep Turning in Circles
HIDDEN UMPRUM
9. 4. 2025 / 16. 6. 2025
We are delighted to present another exhibition at HIDDEN UMPRUM, featuring students of Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague.
We find ourselves in a familiar place. Surrounded by objects that seem both ancient and new, we stand still as if time were folding back on itself. It feels like we’ve returned — and yet we haven’t. These forms shimmer, vibrating between memory and imagination, between what once was and what might return.
In We Keep Turning in Circles, Anastasiia Ilina, Hana Marhounová, and Alex Švígler create an exhibition that opens a space of slow reflection, a place of uncertain belonging. Their works — whether sculptural, drawn, or spatial — evoke a fragile tension between movement and stillness. We feel suspended: as though one foot were already stepping forward while the other remains anchored in what has just ended. How long can we stay in this moment before it dissolves? When does waiting become remembering?
Each of the artists moves between the tangible and the elusive, between matter and illusion. Reality (but also illusion) never fully stabilizes; it constantly slips through the cracks of perception. Sometimes it condenses into something we can grasp, and sometimes it evaporates before we can name it. The moment becomes both an anchor and an opening, a return and a release. We may touch the stone, yet it’s not the stone we remember.
Ilina’s works speak through a logic of surfaces and silent inner structures that seem to pulse within the stillness of the material. Marhounová’s fragile forms oscillate between intimacy and distance, presence and disappearance. Švígler’s drawings resemble half-forgotten maps or celestial diagrams, revealing a geometry that briefly appears before fading again.
Together, their works form an elusive landscape — a world that feels close but resists possession. There are no clear boundaries here; everything overlaps. The lines between memory and the present blur. Like ancient geoglyphs seen from too near, their traces are only partially visible, accessible through fragments and sensations.
We keep turning in circles. The gaze moves, but the center remains hidden — the very thing that keeps the world in motion.
Text: Helena Todorová