Lenka the giraffe was captured in Kenya in 1954 and transported to Prague Zoo to become the very first Czechoslovak giraffe. She survived only two years in captivity, after which her body was donated to the National Museum in Prague. Her insides were then dissolved at the museum’s taxidermy workshops, leaving only her skin, while her remains were reportedly released into the public sewer system.

Travelling from the 60th Venice Biennale to the National Gallery Prague The heart of a giraffe in captivity is twelve kilos lighter brings multiple recollections of Lenka’s life to explore the violence of captivity but also possibilities for healing and recovery. Chapters of Lenka’s journey are staged inside of the exhibition’s gigantic tunnel, modelled on the neck of the animal in the extreme vulnerability of sleep. They are interpreted by children, educators, and older people, who have worked with Eva Koťátková on a series of workshops at schools and community centres around the Czech Republic, using transformative educational methodologies of the collective Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures.

The exhibition aims to question the hierarchies and extractive practices embedded in the way we encounter, view and learn about animals to bring out collective and critical imagination. It draws on lesser-known events in Czechoslovakia’s history of animal acquisition from the countries of the Global South, suggesting modes of engagement where care and imagination are as important as historical narratives. In the soundscape ’The World of the Free’, created by artists and composers Himali Singh Soin and David Soin Tappeser (Hylozoic/Desires), reparative poetry is composed from historical records of Lenka’s journey and accounts of her death.

Lenka’s presence materializes in the Small Hall of the Trade Fair Palace to testify to another stage of her life, her endless retirement as an object of science in the National Museum’s storage facility. The giraffe’s aged taxidermy was scanned in situ, focusing on empty spaces of cracks on the artefact. Transformed by the artist into tactile objects, the texture of the cracks is imprinted in the casts, and a notion of resuscitation, care and burial is recalled and shared with the audience.

At the National Gallery Prague, the exhibition is extended by further collaborations with artists Kateřina Konvalinová and Jiří Žák, Denisa Langrová and Alex Sihelsk, Sára Märc, and Maja Štefančíková. The stories, performances, images and sounds of their responses form a complex “metabolism” of a fragmented-yet-collective body. With Lenka’s Classroom – a new space of learning and (un)learning – this body aims to foster belonging through reparative and ecological relations instead of fixed notions of identity, taxonomy, borders, and nations.

In collaboration with Himali Singh Soin & David Soin Tappesser (Hyzoloic/Desires), the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures collective, groups of children and older people, Kateřina Konvalinová and Jiří Žák, Denisa Langrová and Alex Sihelsk, Sára Märc, Maja Štefančíková

Curator/Text by Hana Janečková
Venue: Small Hall of the Trade Fair Palace