The exhibition brings together two artists from different cultural contexts: Tereza Holá from the Czech Republic and Onongua Enkhtur from Mongolia. Their artistic dialogue grows out of a deeply rooted relationship to nature and the land from which humans draw their sustenance, while simultaneously returning to it, both literally and symbolically, what they have received. This relationship—cyclical, transformative and fundamentally ritualistic—is the starting point of the exhibition. It points towards an exploration of the role of matter, the body and the offering in culturally distinct yet shared ways of thinking about life.
The installation is framed by dožínky, the Czech harvest festival, and the Mongolian rituals of tahilga, celebrations of gratitude, birth and transition. These rituals—one marking the end of the harvest, the other unfolding around the rhythms of the herd and the gifts of milk—are rooted in the belief that nature is a living and sacred system with which humans do not enter into a one-sided relationship of consumption, but rather into one of spiritual exchange. Historically, offerings served as a means of establishing or maintaining relationships with natural or transcendent forces. Across different cultures, including those of Central Europe and Central Asia, these offerings involved not only natural resources such as grain, milk and water, but also time, labour and the body. In contemporary artistic contexts, this practice re-emerges, stripped of its literal religious framework yet charged more strongly with environmental symbolism.
Reciprocity in the work of both artists does not operate solely on a symbolic level; it is embedded directly in their ways of working with materials. Both artists use natural materials—grass, straw, clay and leather—not merely as artistic media, but as signs within a complex system of exchange between landscape, body and culture. In the exhibition, Tereza Holá’s golden sun discs made from wheat stalks intertwine with Onongua Enkhtur’s grass braids and clusters of organic forms. The image of grain as a source of nourishment encounters that of grass as a living material, together with the idea of a space that receives, preserves and gives back. A visual language emerges in which agricultural labour, corporeality and natural cycles permeate one another. The objects are records of labour as well as sites of transformation: grass becomes nourishment, nourishment becomes body, and the body once again becomes part of the landscape.
Transformation—whether biological, ritual or symbolic—is a central motif of the exhibition. The boundary between matter and spirit is not drawn here but dissolves through the process. Likewise, the works of both artists organically grow into one another within the installation, regardless of individual authorship, acknowledging the idea that “everything is one.”
For Onongua Enkhtur, the act of braiding is both a bodily and relational experience. She transfers the rhythm and gesture of braiding her own hair to braiding grass and subsequently weaving it into larger structures during performative actions. In the artist’s words, her hair is her antenna—a medium through which she connects with nature. The gathering of material for braiding is preceded by a gesture of respect: when cutting grass, the artist asks nature for permission. This seemingly simple act demonstrates that taking living material is not understood as a given, but as part of a relationship that presupposes a form of reciprocity.
In Tereza Holá’s practice, the theme of feeding humanity repeatedly intersects with the responsibility that comes with the disproportionate exploitation of nature and its resources. This pressing social issue is connected in her work to the intimate realm of female corporeality and motherhood, to examining the limits of bodily depletion, but also to the search for a source of nourishment that is not merely physical. Here, the body, like the landscape, becomes a place from which one can draw sustenance, while at the same time not being an inexhaustible resource. Care, nourishment and reproduction are therefore inseparably connected with questions of measure, exhaustion and responsibility.
The installation Taken and Given can also be interpreted as a contemporary echo of the pre-Christian ritual of capturing the “spirit of the grain”, as described by James George Frazer in his anthropological work The Golden Bough. According to traditional beliefs, the life force of the harvest gradually retreated before the reapers’ sickles until it became concentrated in the last uncut stalk or sheaf of grain. These were woven into anthropomorphic forms in which the life force of the harvest was believed to be captured and preserved. One possible parallel can be found in Tereza Holá’s objects, whose forms oscillate between grain stalk, body and vessel of life force.
She returns the ambivalent character of the harvest festival—in which the act of harvesting and symbolic violence is intertwined with gratitude for the harvest and its continuation—in a contemporary, objectified form.
Onongua Enkhtur’s specific artistic experience grows out of a nomadic way of life on the Mongolian steppe, one dependent on natural cycles. Her work stems from an awareness that the lives of both people and herds are directly intertwined with changes in the landscape and the availability of water, grass and other resources. Her works also respond to the impacts of human activity on natural processes, raising questions of care, reciprocity and the interdependence of humans and the environment they inhabit. In this respect, her experience meets that of Tereza Holá: through material and the body, both artists point to the fact that receiving from nature always also means entering into a relationship that presupposes a response.
The exhibition also explores the space between receiving and giving back—a space that can be understood as an ethical field of tension, in which a gift is not simply an act of generosity, but also carries an aspect of obligation and reciprocity. It loosely develops the intellectual tradition of the gift as a social and spiritual contract, for example as formulated by Marcel Mauss, in which a gift is never entirely without expectation, but creates a network of obligations and relationships that sustain both community and balance with the surrounding world.
Within this framework, the gift, and its variation in the form of an offering, does not appear as an isolated gesture but as part of a broader ontology of reciprocity between humans and nature. Through their works, the artists suggest that the ability to understand a gift as an obligation is a key element of environmental sensitivity. This is not merely about returning to embodied experience, but about transforming the value system in which receiving is not an automatic right, but requires an awareness of responsibility and a readiness for exchange—whether physical, symbolic or cultural.
