Poetics of Encryption Rudlofinum Gallery

From February 13 to May 11, 2025, the prestigious Galerie Rudolfinum in Prague will host the group exhibition Poetics of Encryption, focusing on mystery, secrecy, and the elusiveness of digital technologies.

How do they affect our everyday reality? How do they reshape cultural space and time? And how is this phenomenon reflected in contemporary art?

We live in an era where we are constantly surrounded by advanced technologies—we rely on them, yet we rarely truly understand how they work. Encryption (coding, encoding) thus becomes a metaphor for the hidden world of algorithms, artificial intelligence, and information systems, whose structures remain impenetrable.

The exhibition is based on Nadim Samman’s book Poetics of Encryption: Art in the Technocene and is divided into three thematic sections, each reflecting different aspects of this phenomenon:

Black Site – explores the feeling of being locked within digital systems and our inability to escape them.
Black Box – reflects on the invisible mechanisms of modern technologies and their inaccessibility to human understanding.
Black Hole – deals with the blurring of boundaries between the physical and virtual world, between knowledge and chaos, between past and future.

Galerie Rudolfinum
Galerie Rudolfinum is one of the most significant institutions dedicated to contemporary art in the Czech Republic. Its exhibition spaces, housed in the iconic Neo-Renaissance Rudolfinum building, provide the perfect setting for ambitious and conceptually profound projects such as Poetics of Encryption.

This exhibition is not just a visual experience—it is an invitation to reflect on how technology influences our lives, what hidden layers it contains, and how we can (or cannot) cope with it. Come explore the digital mysteries of art and immerse yourself in the poetics of encryption!

WHERE: Galerie Rudolfinum
WHEN: 13.2.–11.5.2025
PRICE: Free

Find all tips for the EVENTS IN PRAGUE.