The Fourth Biennale Matter of Art, titled Necessary Wishes, includes photographs from Jürgen Baldiga’s archive, held by Berlin’s Schwules Museum. Baldiga’s work is placed alongside new and historical projects exploring queer life, migration and collective care.
The biennale is curated by Jaroslava Tomanová, Jakub Gawkowski and František Fekete. It unfolds at the National Gallery Prague – Trade Fair Palace, Dukelských Hrdinů 530/47, and runs June 12–Sept. 13, 2026.
The curatorial frame is explicit about practice and solidarity. As the curators put it, artistic form can be “a vehicle for solidarity and compassion, functioning as a carrier, proxy and instrument for strengthening insurgent communities.” That idea gives the Schwules Museum loan a clear role: these photographs are not archival relics but active testimony in a broader conversation about rights, illness and community.
Baldiga lived in West Berlin from 1979 to 1994. His documentary photographs and requested portraits record queer life as it faced stigma and the AIDS crisis. The sequence in Prague draws on material now cared for in Berlin and brings that local history into a continental context where questions of displacement and survival are central.
Necessary Wishes also stages younger artists and collectives working through scarcity, commons-making and migration. The architecture of the show, designed by RUINA office, leans on recycled materials and scaffolding logic—a practical echo of the biennale’s politics of necessity. For Berlin readers, the presence of Baldiga’s archive in Prague is a reminder that the city’s queer histories travel; they continue to shape debates about memory, care and political solidarity beyond Berlin’s borders.
