‘KAFKAesque’ Exhibition Marks 100 Years Since Kafka’s Death

On show at DOX in Prague, the exhibition evokes feelings of estrangement and futility through works by artists including David Lynch, Mat Collishaw, and Jake & Dinos Chapman.

A century after his death on 3 June 1924, Czech author Franz Kafka's name remains synonymous with alienation from modern life.

'The number of artists who have dealt with Kafka in some way is enormous,' said Otto M. Urban, one of the curators of the exhibition KAFKAesque at the DOX Centre for Contemporary Art in Prague through 22 September.

'We have primarily selected artists whose work has featured Kafka more indirectly, but all the more intensely,' he said.

The exhibition features works by more than 30 artists, including Douglas Gordon, Viktor Pivovarov, Nicola Samori, and Alexander Tinei.

British artist Mat Collishaw is presenting an animatronic deer skeleton that buckles and falls in response to hateful comments posted on X, a work that raises questions about contemporary mechanics of power and surveillance.

The exhibition also includes darkly psychological paintings by director David Lynch and unsettling sculptures and drawings by Jake & Dinos Chapman. A female mannequin in a floral print dress, for instance, smiles beneath empty eye sockets, her eyeballs in her hand.

Jake Chapman and Belgian sculptor Johan Tahon will discuss their relationships with Franz Kafka's work in a talk at the museum on 12 June.

'The interest in Kafka's work has given rise to the term "Kafkaesque", which attempts to capture the essential features of Kafka's texts: the omnipresent influence of unknown authorities and apparatuses of power, and the futile efforts of those who are trapped in their arbitrary labyrinths,' said Michaela Šilpochová, co-curator of the exhibition and artistic director of DOX.

'In the words of Hannah Arendt, it is a "tyranny without a tyrant" with obscure laws, confusing procedures, absurd logic, but also humour. All this is conceived outside of a specific time and space,' she said.

Also marking the 100 years since Kafka's death is Sotheby's, who are auctioning off a letter, penned in 1920, in which the author complains of crippling writer's block.

'I haven't written anything for three years, what's published now are old things, I don't have any other work, not even started,' Kafka writes to Austrian poet Albert Ehrenstein.

Bidding on the letter—which has an estimate of £70,000–90,000 (U.S. $76,000–98,000)—is open from 27 June to 11 July. —[O]