The Language of Flowers

The exhibition The Language of Flowers focuses on the symbolism of plants in connection with people and their relationships. As part of a year-long dramaturgical cycle entitled Weeding and Weaving, it deals with the metaphor of weeds in the context of social norms and tries to rehabilitate their image—to show weeds as something vital, surviving, fertilizing.

Throughout the exhibition we repeatedly see an arrow, which can be read as an evocation of aggression as well as defense, as posing the question of who is being attacked (who is to be annihilated), and last but not least, in the context of the exhibition, as a symbol of Cupid, the god of love, who is present in different ways in the works of all the exhibitors.

An older video by artist and filmmaker Alžběta Bačíková entitled The Language of Flowers (2014) is a silent dialogue conducted through plants which addresses the difficulties of romantic and partner relationships and the (im)possibility of understanding one another and truly speaking a common language. It also hints at how quickly a loving relationship can become “infested with weeds.”

A selection of works from the graduate series of artist Lucie Lienerová, who works under the artistic name Lištica, presents glass arrows as well as small-format paintings based on the artist’s relationship with a close friend. Through her paintings, Lištica reflects on the issue of processing mental anguish, and following the example of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, she lets human and plant entities merge in a process of liberating transformation.

Artist and educator Barbora Lungová embodies the radical activist potential of gardening with her long-term project The Rainbow Garden. Using the example of the names of different varieties of iris, she reveals how oppressive and, among other things, homophobic thinking has seeped into the field of botany. The Rainbow Garden, on the other hand, is a celebration of diversity and the richness of human and non-human forms of love and mutual care. Lungová’s artist book Květomluva is accompanied by a video created in collaboration with Tamara Conde, and The Rainbow Garden has been documented photographically and supplemented with an AI perspective by Barbora Trnková.

The project was realized with the financial support of the Capital City of Prague.

The project was funded by the Municipal District of Prague 6, the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, and Gestor – The Union for the Protection of Authorship.