Tuesday June 30, 2026 | 6:30 PM – 10:00 PM
Location: Czech Center New York, Bohemian National Hall
321 E 73rd Street, New York, NY 10021 (map)
This evening brings together photographer Libuše Jarcovjáková and artist Petra Janda, both current artists in residence at Residency Unlimited (RU), and artist Miatta Kawinzi (RU alum), through a shared interest in communities, care, and alternative ways of living together. Following Jarcovjáková’s conversation with Allen Frame in the cinema, Janda will stage a solo performance in the ballroom, after which the evening will ease into a rooftop screening of Kawinzi’s audiovisual poetic meditation, and an informal gathering with the featured artists and other RU artists.
TICKETS
6:30-7:30PM | Libuše Jarcovjáková in conversation w/ Allen Frame | Cinema
NYC-based photographer, writer, and curator Allen Frame will engage in a public conversation with Libuše Jarcovjáková to explore her photographic practice, artistic journey, and the personal and social histories reflected in her work.
7:30-10PM | Rooftop screening + Reception | Rooftop
Miatta Kawinzi’s SHE GATHER ME, presented continuously on a loop as part of an informal gathering with Libuše Jarcovjáková, Petra Janda, Miatta Kawinzi, other Residency Unlimited artists, and members of New York’s art community. Titled after a line from Toni Morrison’s Beloved, the poetic audiovisual work uses analog and digital film, video, and sound to explore physical and mental landscapes of the African Diaspora, reflecting on place, belonging, and refuge.
8-8:30PM | Performance by Petra Janda | Ballroom
The first iteration* of Janda’s ongoing project Hungry Plants, based on her research of different types of plants and their feeding habits. Following meditations on caretaking and its related worries, the artist explores fine lines regarding care and belonging. Performers: Petra Janda and Krsto Gligorjadis (current RU artists in residence).
This evening brings together photographer Libuše Jarcovjáková and artist Petra Janda, both current artists in residence at RU, and artist Miatta Kawinzi (RU alum), through a shared interest in communities, care, and alternative ways of living together. While Jarcovjáková’s photographs document the intimate social worlds of Prague’s underground and queer communities during late socialism, Janda’s collaborative and ecological practice explores how relationships, mutual support, and collective action can shape contemporary artistic and social spaces. Furthermore, Kawinzi moves between poetics and abstraction to re-imagine topics of identity and culture in relation to multiplicity within the African Diaspora. Together, their work invites us to reflect on art’s capacity to create spaces of belonging, visibility, and connection.
*The second edition of Janda’s Hungry Plants will be featured as part of the group exhibition at the RU House on Governors Island, opening on July 18.
About:
Petra Janda, laureate of the 2023 Jindřich Chalupecký Award, is a multimedia artist whose work moves between art, education, ecology, and spirituality. Her site-specific installations and objects explore the relationship between people, the environment, and inner psychological processes. Through subtle, open-ended forms, community projects, ancient myths, and protective, often feminine motifs, she addresses sustainability and care, emphasizing the interconnectedness of personal and ecological transformation.
Libuše Jarcovjáková is a Prague-based photographer and visual storyteller whose raw, atmospheric work offers a deeply personal record of intimacy, self-reflection, and marginalized communities. Emerging from the Czechoslovak underground of the 1970s and 80s, she captured life under socialism, including nightlife, bars, street scenes, and Prague’s LGBTQ+ community, with uncompromising immediacy and poetic force. Known for her analogue black-and-white photography, high-grain film, and harsh direct flash, Jarcovjáková embraces imperfection to explore freedom, identity, love, confinement, depression, and the urgency of recording the present.
Miatta Kawinzi is a multi-disciplinary artist, experimental filmmaker, writer, and educator. Her work explores practices of re-imagining the self, identity, place, and culture through abstraction and poetics. Of Liberian and Kenyan heritage, Kawinzi was raised in Tennessee and Kentucky and has been based in Brooklyn, NY since 2010. Her work engages interior and exterior landscapes to illuminate themes of inter-connectivity, hybridity, and diaspora. She received an MFA in Studio Art from Hunter College and a BA in Interdisciplinary Art and Cultural Theory from Hampshire College.
Allen Frame is a photographer, writer, and curator based in New York, where he has had numerous solo exhibitions at Gitterman Gallery and released four books of photography, including Whereupon, 2023; Innamorato,2023; Fever, 2021; and Detour, 2001. A winner of the 2017/2018 Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, he is an Adjunct Professor of Photography at Pratt Institute, also teaching at the School of Visual Arts, the International Center of Photography, and for Strudelmedialive. He has curated solo shows of the work of Darrel Ellis and Charles Henri Ford, among others, and many group exhibitions, including Eros Rising at Clamp Gallery in 2026.
Presented by Czech Center New York and Residency Unlimited in collaboration with Jindřich Chalupecký Society. Petra Janda’s residency is made possible with support from the Trust for Mutual Understanding. Performance in-kind support is provided by Materials for the Arts. Part of the Safer Spaces program.
