Bedřichovice Upon Thames

Kateřina Šedá’s work is part of the broader current of the social turn in contemporary art, within which — as Claire Bishop has described — interest has come to focus on “collectivity, collaboration, and direct engagement with specific social constituencies”.¹Claire Bishop, “The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents”, in: Artforum 2 (2006), 178-183: 178. Available online at: https://www.artforum.com/features/the-social-turn-collaboration-and-its-discontents-173361/. ↩ The artist often strives to involve local inhabitants, to establish long-term collaboration with a specific locality, to overcome social isolation, and to strengthen collective belonging. From this perspective, the project From Morning till Night, carried out between 2011 and 2015 in collaboration with the South Moravian village of Bedřichovice, appears to be her most successful. The main aim of this multi-year project was to “establish a new village holiday [and] persuade the residents to all stay at home on one day each year and try to see the village and themselves in a completely different light.”²Kateřina Šedá and Yvona Ferencová, eds., Povolání: Šedá, Ostrava 2019, 711.. ↩ Šedá recalls that she “waited to see whether the people of Bedřichovice would keep the new tradition alive. And they did: in 2019 they celebrated the village holiday for the fourth time, organizing everything themselves.”³Šedá and Ferencová (2019), 711. ↩

Thee first edition took place on 3 September 2011 in London. At the invitation of curators Kathy Noble and Catherine Wood, Šedá organized the celebration as part of the Tate Modern Live programme. For the eighty citizens of Bedřichovice who signed up to take part in the project, Šedá arranged accommodation, travel, and pocket money, and asked them to do there what they normally do on a weekend in Bedřichovice. Within a defined area the size of their village, between Tate Modern and St Paul’s Cathedral, they performed behaviour as if they were at home — they played badminton, celebrated birthdays, beat carpets, delivered the mail, and lent books in the library. In addition, eighty British painters were given in advance photographs of specific sites in Bedřichovice. At the corresponding spots on the map of the London Bedřichovice, they were then tasked with painting from memory views of actual houses in the Moravian village.

A year later, an event took place in Bedřichovice itself. To attract local residents, the artist used the slogan “GIVE ME A HOLIDAY!” Participants were asked to “perform an activity that leads from nothing to nothing”, to have lunch together, and, on the basis of a signed employment contract, to collect their wages in person at a precisely specified time in the local cultural centre. The third edition of the project featured an “idler-catching” (doing-nothing) competition, whose aim was to involve not only citizens of working age but also senior citizens and children. The fourth edition then took the form of elections: everyone, again including children, had the opportunity to set up their own electoral group and stand as a candidate. In the meantime, the project gradually expanded to include additional activities — from an annual group photograph of the residents to the publication of books, conversation guides, calendars, and diaries.

The overall revitalisation of the village centre, under the title Bedřichovice upon Thames, also became part of the project. In the village square, which thus acquired “the character of a memorial”⁴Šedá and Ferencová (2019), 253. ↩ to the event at Tate Modern, new elements evoking London were created thanks to a European grant: “the Bedřichovice Meridian”, a red telephone box, a children’s climbing frame in the shape of a double-decker bus, and a road paved with wave-like curves representing the River Thames. In this way, the circle was closed: whereas in 2011 Šedá had brought Bedřichovice to London, in 2015 the area around Tate Modern was transposed into Bedřichovice. That same year, the local authorities awarded the artist honorary citizenship “for her contribution to improving the village, thanks to which it has achieved worldwide renown”.⁵Šedá and Ferencová (2019), 302. ↩

Catherine Wood, curator at Tate Modern, highlighted the artist’s ability to challenge established institutional modes of presenting art and to work sensitively with the geographical dimension: “Kateřina’s approach challenges the idea that the major institution lifts an artist from their context and represents them within it. Art museums have been doing this for a long time, since they started taking religious icon paintings from churches and displaying them in white-walled galleries. Kateřina proposes an important alternative, a kind of re-planting of the institution in the original context, […] grafting one location to another, and back again. This movement between realities, it’s almost a post-internet way of imagining the collapse of geographical localities applied in realitme: a realtime cut and paste.”⁶“Bedřichovice nad Temží. Písemný dialog Yvony Ferencové s umělkyní Kateřinou Šedou, architektkou Jitkou Ressovou, grafickým designerem Radimem Peškem a kurátorkou Catherine Wood v srpnu 2015”, in: Bulletin Moravské galerie 72 (2015), 80-89: 88. ↩

The combination of an analytical approach with live action and collaboration with people — a method that has become characteristic of Šedá — was already present in her work during her studies in Vladimír Kokolia’s studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (1999—2005). She herself emphasises the crucial influence of her teacher: “When I joined his studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in 2000, I had no idea what a crucial role Vladimír Kokolia would play in my life. He completely changed my perspective on things, upended the way I’d thought about the world around me, and shattered everything I’d been certain about.”⁷https://www.katerinaseda.cz/en/. ↩ Kokolia’s retirement after thirty-three years of teaching at the Academy then became for Šedá yet another reason to organise a participatory event — a several-day performative celebration involving both former and current students from Kokolia’s studio (Koko Gathering, 2025).

Participatory Art

Interest in social impact, in the very process of events and in optimising conditions, as well as in activating the surrounding environment, has been present in Šedá’s work for a long time. As early as 2001, Šedá organised a Window Exhibition in Líšeň. Around 150 residents took part, displaying in their windows things they wanted to show off. An eloquent example of this is her description of an action that followed a year later: “In early 2002 I went outside to do a landscape painting. However, the curious onlookers that gathered around me while I painted were so distracting that I couldn’t work. So, I made a sign that read ‘Quiet, Please! I’m painting,’ expecting it would discourage any other bystanders. It had the opposite effect, though; the number of onlookers grew, and when at one point there was a crowd of 20 people around me, I realized that I was much more interested in looking at them than the landscape before me.”⁸Kateřina Šedá and Petr Babák, eds., Kateřina Šedá *1977, Prague 2007, unpag. ↩

A breakthrough work that confirmed Šedá’s affiliation with participatory art — “characterised by its emphasis on the site-specific nature of the work and its focus on specific communities whose involvement in the project is essential to the way the work is ultimately read”⁹Jan Zálešák, “Kateřina Šedá, Nic tam není”, in: Jan Zálešák, Umění spolupráce, Praha 2011, 217-238: 217. ↩ — can be seen in There Is Nothing There (2003). This was the first time Šedá embarked on organising an activity that involved a larger number of people in a given locality, specifically the entire village of Ponětovice. She based the project on a questionnaire which showed that most inhabitants spent their Saturdays in almost the same way and also shared the feeling that there was nothing in the village, in the sense that nothing ever happened there. In response, Šedá organised “Regime for a Day”, which mirrored the typical way they spent their Saturdays and which everyone was to follow on one particular Saturday. At the same hour they opened their windows, went shopping for the same things, swept their pavements, the children rode their bikes, at noon everyone ate the same meal, in the evening they all went for a beer together, and at the same moment they went to bed. For Šedá, the aim was to show people that “big things can happen in small towns, too: all you have to do is do it together.” She then proverbially glossed the locals’ desire to repeat the event with the words: “they did not understand that organizing this game was now entirely in their own hands.”¹⁰Rozhovor Jany Klusákové s Kateřinou Šedou, in: Kateřina Šedá and Yvona Ferencová, eds., Povolání: Šedá, Ostrava 2019, 46-48: 48. ↩

The focus on interpersonal relations is what links Šedá’s work to the art of the 1990s associated with relational aesthetics, as defined by Nicolas Bourriaud.¹¹Nicolas Bourriaud, Esthétique relationelle, Dijon 1998. ↩ She is, however, primarily interested in long-term collaboration with a specific local social group: “Participation in Kateřina Šedá’s events is usually voluntary, but at the same time limited to precisely specified groups of people (neighbours, family).”¹²Tomáš Pospiszyl, “Popírání Ponětovic”, in: Sešit pro umění, teorii a příbuzné zóny 4-5 (2008), 161-166: 163. ↩ Rather than creating new social situations “from scratch”, and thus shifting the emphasis towards activating the gallery visitor — or disorienting or unsettling the viewer, the “befuddlement of the viewer” of which Hal Foster speaks — in her large-scale projects she is primarily concerned with activating people at the local level.¹³Hal Foster, “Arty Party”, in: London Review of Books 23 (2003), (21-22). Available online at: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v25/n23/hal-foster/arty-party. ↩ Perhaps for this reason Yvona Ferencová stresses that her work cannot easily be fitted into existing boxes: “Šedá’s projects can only with difficulty and reservations be labeled under existing theoretical categories. Their distinctiveness stems from the artist’s premises and intentions: through her projects she disrupts stereotypes of individual and group behavior, fundamentally transforms established patterns, and opens up a space for communication based on sharing.”¹⁴Yvona Ferencová et al. (2015), 81. ↩

The theme of activation, so crucial for art that explores social aesthetics,¹⁵Lars Bang Larsen, “Social Aesthetics”, in: Afterall 1 (1999), 77-87. ↩ was already present in one of Šedá’s early projects, for which she received the Jindřich Chalupecký Award for young artists in the Czech Republic, and in which she involved her grandmother (It Doesn’t Matter, 2005—2007). As a former employee of the Household Goods shop, at Šedá’s request her grandmother gradually drew hundreds of types of goods that they had in stock in the shop where she had worked all her life. Šedá recalls that her desire to create a programme for others and organise their activities dated back to her childhood: “When I was a child, I felt the need to order my friends around: I was convinced I knew best what we should do, where we should go, what we should play…”¹⁶“Can you draw a horse? Kateřina Šedá interviewed by Jana Klusáková, in: Kateřina Šedá: For Every Dog a Different Master, ed. Radim Peško, Praha 2008, 168-197: 171. ↩ And her notes from her time studying at the Academy of Fine Arts make it clear that this has long been a priority: “At the meeting, the table in the middle was missing — that was a great thing. Once the table was gone, people sat down differently. In future I would get rid of the table altogether. Kokolia doesn’t need it anyway.”¹⁷Kateřina Šedá, Vladimír Kokolia, Slovník Kateřiny Š., Praha 2017, 16. ↩

A Shared Matter

“The event had a very positive effect in that the citizens of Bedřichovice got to know each other much better,” was how one of the direct participants described the Bedřichovice project.¹⁸Šedá and Ferencová (2019), 249. ↩ Šedá “managed to ensure that these people spent the whole day together on the village square […] and I find the result amazing — that she brought people together in this way.”¹⁹Šedá and Ferencová (2019), 265. ↩ Similar moments are present in other projects, such as For Every Dog A Different Master (2007), when Šedá sent by post parcels containing shirts to a thousand selected families living on the Líšeň housing estate in Brno. The shirts were made from fabric whose pattern was derived from the heterogeneous coloured shapes on the renovated façades of the panel apartment buildings, and as the sender she did not give herself, but another selected family from the same estate: “people themselves have to share a common thing; otherwise it will not bring them together.”²⁰Šedá and Ferencová (2019), 156. ↩

The fences between plots of land in her native Líšeň also became, for Šedá, a metaphor of a shared matter; she noticed that they were gradually turning into opaque ramparts: “It became almost impossible to say hello to anyone through the fences.”²¹Šedá and Ferencová (2019), 710. ↩ In order to reconnect the neighbours, she planned to get across the fences of more than eighty properties. At the 5th Berlin Biennial, in the exhibition When Things Cast No Shadow curated by Elena Filipovic and Adam Szymczyk, Šedá presented a sketch for this project — mock-ups of several actual fences from Líšeň built in a circle, from which the neighbours had to find a way out together (Over and Over, 2008).

Another recurring motif in Šedá’s work is her effort to bridge the gap between the general public and the art world. In this, she aligns herself with artists who seek to bring art and life closer together by appropriating certain social forms and practices. As Claire Bishop has reminded us, “although the photographic documentation of these projects implies a relationship to performance art, they differ in striving to collapse the distinction between performer and the audience, professional and amateur, production and reception.”²²Claire Bishop, “Introduction”, in Claire Bishop, ed., Participation, London 2006, 10-17: 10. ↩ As part of the Bedřichovice project, for instance, a Bedřichovice Triathlon was held, which linked Bedřichovice with the Moravian Gallery in Brno by means of a bicycle ride.²³Šedá and Ferencová (2019), 287. ↩ In addition, during the renovation of the Bedřichovice cultural centre, Šedá transferred the local activities for a time to the Moravian Gallery as part of the exhibition Bedřichovice upon Thames. The activities included a wide range of events, from celebrating the birthdays of the oldest female residents of Bedřichovice, through callanetics exercise classes, to a fire brigade meeting.²⁴Šedá and Ferencová (2019), 286. ↩

And finally, thanks to the revitalisation of the village square, the surroundings of London’s Tate ultimately took material form in Bedřichovice as well: “In Bedřichovice it’s just like at that gallery. Those benches, the birch trees. We sat under those birch trees in London and it felt just like being at home in Bedřichovice,” as one Bedřichovice resident described the experience.²⁵Šedá and Ferencová (2019), 297 ↩ This approach again follows on from projects that Šedá had already realised during her studies, including her diploma work defended in 2005 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague under the title The Grey Commission, a play on the artist’s surname Šedá, which means grey in English. Its aim was “breaking down the prejudices about the impossibility of mutual understanding” by creating a parallel committee made up of “ordinary” people — the artist’s relatives, who had no art education.²⁶Šedá and Ferencová (2019), 722. ↩ This committee then evaluated the students, including Kateřina herself, and produced written assessments of their work.

Setting the Rules of the Game

When Šedá gradually established herself on the international scene in the early 2000s — for example through her participation in Documenta 12 (2007), Manifesta 7 (2008), the 5th Berlin Biennial (2008), and the Venice Biennale (2013) — her work was also discussed in relation to the then topical so-called archival turn in contemporary art, “a tendency where the meaning of the work is construed not on the basis of isolated images but rather always by the syntax of their ordered plurality.”²⁷Karel Císař, “A New Cartographer”, [in: MAM Project: Katerina Seda, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo 2010, 65-70: 66.]{.mark} ↩ It was in these terms that Karel Císař wrote about Šedá, having included her work in two editions of the Prague biennale of young art, Bienále Zvon, in 2005 and 2008. Consistent with this, he did not foreground the social dimension of her work, but rather the method she employed. From this perspective, at the centre of the project There Is Nothing There he saw not any potential positive change in the villagers’ behaviour, but the means used by the artist, including linguistic ones: “However, when Kateřina Šedá synchronised, for the duration of one day, the behaviour of all roughly three hundred inhabitants of the small South Moravian village of Ponětovice, she did not seek to bring about their self-reflection and a possible change in their behaviour, but attempted to show nothing. This is perhaps best evidenced by the title of the entire project There Is Nothing There.”²⁸Karel Císař, [”]{.mark}Život je jinde[”]{.mark}, [Flash Art CZ/SK 10 (2008-2009), 36.]{.mark} ↩

Part of the method that Šedá employs consists of detailed questionnaires (for example, asking what each person is doing at a given hour), lists (of addresses, drawn objects, activities — as in the project for Tate — including the time, type of activity, and required props), rules (for instance, specifying what each participant in the project is supposed to do at a given time), and a large number of sketches, diagrams, and plans describing the layout of the project. During the event itself, strong emphasis is placed on high-quality photographic and video documentation. All these elements, including the responses of the participants themselves in the form of text messages they sent her, are carefully archived by the artist and subsequently used in publications and exhibitions: “Hi, I’m out fishing. Today I’m trying it in London instead of Líšeň. It’s crap. The water is as murky as sh… I haven’t seen a single fin yet. Cheers.”²⁹Šedá and Ferencová (2019), 258. ↩

If Vladimír Kokolia repeatedly highlighted, in his assessments of student work, Šedá’s ability to create myths, Adam Szymczyk has pointed out that her inclination to devise new collective narratives that could give loosely knit communities a clearer sense of orientation and renewed cohesion moves close to the boundary of a potentially problematic approach — a boundary that Šedá, however, does not cross. She avoids the danger that people in her projects might function merely as decoration by insisting that her social interventions be firmly grounded in the concrete experience of encounters with individual participants.³⁰Vladimír Kokolia, “Hodnocení diplomové práce Kateřiny Šedé”, in: Šedá and Ferencová (2019), 672-674: 674. — Adam Szymczyk, “Promises fulfilled. Abstraction embodied. Memory at work”, in: Kateřina Šedá and Fanni Fetzer, eds., Talk to the Sky ‘Cause the Ground Ain’t Listening, Luzern 2012, 57-63. ↩ The word “myth” has also been used by the artist herself. In one published interview she said that she is excited by the idea that, in a given place, a myth might arise from one of her events and turn into a custom that people will want to repeat.³¹Markéta Uhlířová, “Nothing: An Interview with Kateřina Šedá”, in: Umělec 1 (2006), 66-70: 70. ↩

In the early project There Is Nothing There, as Jan Zálešák notes with reference to Grant Kester, “the experience of autonomy in action, the power to conceive and move a creative action towards realization, remains the singular privilege of the artist.”³²Jan Zálešák, “Kateřina Šedá, Nic tam není”, in: Jan Zálešák, Umění spolupráce, Praha 2011, 217-238: 235. ↩ In the Bedřichovice project, however, this principle was taken a step further: the event became genuinely autonomous, since today it is organised by the local inhabitants themselves. In this way, its originally symbolic potential has been transformed into reality. “I didn’t force anyone to do anything. All those activities were invented by the people themselves; I only set the basic rules of the game. What they do with it now is again up to them,” said Kateřina Šedá. The fact that the holiday has not only survived but continues to develop is confirmed by a post by Bedřichovice native Martina Lehmannová, shared on social media in September 2025: “It’s already the fourteenth village holiday commemorating the move of the village of Bedřichovice to Tate! And, as every year, it was fantastic! Meeting the neighbours over fruit brandy, young wine and sausages. And we also took another group photo. Very few places have a village chronicle like this.”

Hana Buddeus, Institute of Art History, Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague

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Kateřina Šedá (Brno, 1977), Bedřichovice upon Thames [Bedřichovice nad Temží], 2011-2015, participative project. Photo: Martin Hlavica