Karolina Raimund thrives on unexpected challenges, approaching them with meticulous care and unwavering passion. She methodically explores and reconsiders ways to engage with each situation, shifting fluidly between the roles of observer and activist. Her work aims to awaken sensitivity to issues we often marginalize or overlook. Long before textiles became a prominent medium in object-based art, Karolina was already engaged in clothing design. She moves effortlessly between photography, object-making, and performance, treating each medium as an equally vital form of expression. Her ethical concerns are infused with a subtle, self-reflective irony that often turns inward. All these elements coalesce in Quadrupedal Runner, a multi-layered exhibition that blends (anti)Darwinian themes with a contemporary take on oral storytelling, embodying the full scope of Karolina's artistic vision.
Karolina Raimund's installation unfolds as a system of interrelated yet distinct chapters or vectors, all converging toward a central idea. The initial spark for this exploration was a specific site: a 3600-square-meter plot of agricultural land in South Moravia, still registered in the land records as belonging to the artist's deceased great-grandmother. This narrow, elongated strip of land has since become an indistinguishable part of a vast agrarian whole, making it difficult to locate both physically and symbolically. The only tangible remnant of her great-grandmother's presence is a small chapel that once marked the boundary of the field. Despite this, the site has become an active participant in a series of artistic interventions and intimate acts of care, seeking to revive and build upon the traces her great-grandmother's body left on this land through daily labor. Only fragments of these actions are present in the exhibition. One key example is a cartographic representation of the field, created through GPS motion tracking. This act of bodily movement, performed by the artist together with her daughter, Anna Perla Kohoutková, becomes a gesture of symbolic reappropriation, as they physically retrace the land's contours to reclaim its boundaries. The playful yet pointed presence of pink pom-poms, held by both runners, serves as a lighthearted but sharply ironic commentary on the struggle to assert one's rights. Within a broader context, the pom-poms evoke the spirit of "soft resistance" often associated with feminist and queer activism, blending personal history with collective, political gestures.
In a similar vein, Karolina employs the symbolic power of the color pink in the form of spray-painted messages, giving animals a "voice" to communicate with humans. This motif is further developed in a photographic series in which a pair of horses return a discarded cage, a piece of scrap metal found beneath a tree in what was once a family garden. This garden, now an urban plot with development potential, reflects the shifting values of land use, where trees are seen less as living beings and more as obstacles to a lucrative real estate profile. This staged act of "interspecies communication" serves as a conceptual bridge, or a "donkey’s bridge", leading into the next chapter: the phenomenon of quadrupedal running, which emerges as a central, unifying theme of the exhibition. Through this motif, the boundaries between human and animal, personal and political, past and present are blurred, inviting reflection on the ways we inhabit and transform shared spaces.
Quadrobics can be understood as an alternative form of physical activity that transcends conventional human movement, drawing inspiration from the gait of horses. Over time, it has evolved into a diverse form of exercise that involves fluid, four-limbed movement in the form of walking, trotting, running, or jumping, mimicking the motion patterns of various quadrupedal animals. This unconventional discipline has gained global popularity, particularly among the Alpha generation, who exchange training techniques and showcase their skills primarily through social media platforms. As a result, quadrobics has grown from a niche practice into a vibrant subculture, marked by its emphasis on play, physical agility, and an embodied connection to non-human movement.
A common, though not exclusive, connection among young people who practice quadrobics is their involvement in animal cosplay and fantasy mythologies. Many also identify with the broader community of alterhumans, a collective term for various sub-identities united by a shared capacity for deep spiritual or psychological connection with an animal or alternative form of self. One notable expression of this connection is the phenomenon of therian shifts, moments when an individual's "animal mind" becomes more prominent, temporarily overshadowing their human consciousness. These shifts are often triggered by intense emotions or direct contact with nature, allowing practitioners to experience a heightened sense of embodiment as their non-human self. This fluid state of identity reflects a deeper exploration of human-animal boundaries, blending personal identity with mythological, spiritual, and imaginative dimensions.
From the perspective of Western psychology, this phenomenon could be understood as a form of dissociation, a psychological defense mechanism that helps individuals cope with or minimize the impact of stress or trauma. Dissociation can also be a side effect of psychoactive substances, further highlighting its complex relationship with altered states of consciousness. However, in her book Raving, McKenzie Wark challenges the conventional view of dissociation as a purely negative or pathological state. She proposes the concept of resociation, a process that reinterprets dissociation as a generative response. Rather than merely a detachment from one's body or the world, resociation allows for a reconfiguration of perception and connection. This shift enables an opening toward "something else," offering the possibility of infinite extension and a more expansive experience of historical time. As Wark writes, he fact that “there’s no words for where we go is maybe the sign that we’re on our own, but on our own together, trying to find the ways we can endure the end of this world.” (Raving, 2024, p. 29). In this view, disconnection is not an endpoint but a threshold—an opportunity to form new, fluid associations with others, the world, and alternative modes of being.
As "far-fetched" as the “advocacy” of alter-identities within the Alpha generation and the experience of gender dysphoria may sound on the surface, the origins of these re-associations can indeed be traced back to ancient shamanic practices and mythologies. In an interview with D. In an interview with D. Eribon, Claude Lévi-Strauss offers a definition of myth through a Native American lens, describing it as a story from a time when humans and animals were not yet separate entities.
Myth operates in a fundamentally different way than the Cartesian method. It rejects the fragmentation of a problem into isolated parts, never settling for partial explanations. Instead, myth seeks to understand phenomena holistically, framing issues as interconnected and interdependent. When a problem arises, myth draws parallels between seemingly disparate domains, cosmological, physical, moral, legal, social, etc., and endeavors to explain all of these issues simultaneously. (D. Eribon, Conversations with Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1991, p. 139)
Karolina Raimund's way of thinking could be described as homologous at this point. She identifies similarities in many gestures and points to signs of a shared origin, all leading to a unified artistic core. By mapping the experiences of the women in her family across generations, she perceives the human body on all fours not as a sign of progression or regression, but as a convergence, in line with the Darwinian duality of developmental chronology. She views quadrupedal running as homologous with working in the fields—hard labor connected to the earth, but also living in harmony with the rhythms of the seasons, the weather, and the fruits of her labor and care. She does not delve into the shamanic rituals of foreign cultures but practices her own: she plants a ring of daffodils around the chapel and symbolically appropriates the land by stomping in pink boots or marking its boundaries with her own body. Through exaggerated laughter, which, like dissociation, serves as a defense mechanism in moments of fear or insecurity, she goes further, creating an image of a new divine (queer) being with seven limbs. All of this results from an intuitive, painstaking, and persistent year-long process of working on the exhibition, much like the labor of cultivating a garden or field, but in shorter and multiple cycles.
The third part of the exhibition conveys the same message, yet operates through a contradictory principle of analogies. The photographs of scars on human skin do not primarily reflect on the origins of injury and pain, but instead honor the capacity for regeneration, resilience, and adaptability. The artist compares the beauty of "imperfect" skin to the unorthodox beauty found in nature, based on external similarities. Another analogy is scarification, which encompasses both a form of skin decoration and a cultivation technique used to mechanically or chemically damage the seed coats of plants, mimicking natural processes to aid germination. The one-to-one transposition of the chapel (and the fact that the artist created it herself) serves as another way of connecting with historical time and creating alternative presences. Yet, beneath the imagery of a small sacred building, which once blessed travelers and workers, lies another sacrament: a germination chamber that preserves future trees, a source of oxygen, and a symbol of the ability to synthesize life.
Thanks to
Marek Dostál, Jaroslav Sterec, Lenka Klodová, Pavel Holomek, Tomáš Tichý, Ivan Černý, Jiří Suchánek, Anna Perla Kohoutková, Petr Brunclík, May Black Pearl, 199 Nonius Abigél, Pavel Dvořák, Vlastimil Dvořák, David Holubec, FaVU, AZ SKLO, Legia, Floraprint, Dřevo Sladký, Matúš Stenko, David Mišťúrik.
