The exhibition Soil and Friends invites viewers to look down to where our feet meet the ground. This major exhibition is a joint project of PLATO Ostrava, thirty artists, and the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw. What if soil is our closest—yet least understood—ally? Visitors can explore this question in the exhibition open until 13 September 2026. The project is the centrepiece marking the 10th anniversary of PLATO’s existence.
The international exhibition Soil and Friends, which occupies all the halls of the PLATO Gallery, was curated by Marianna Dobkowska and Edith Jeřábková. The curators view soil as a living, dynamic community of organisms, relationships, and processes; as an essential prerequisite for life on Earth; and as an environment in which sustainable alliances among all living forms, including humans, are formed.
The exhibition presents a multi-layered narrative of soil as a biological system, cultural space, historical archive, and political issue. It brings together scientific knowledge, artistic imagination, and practical experience from farming and landscape care. The first part of the exhibition took place last year in Warsaw.
Soil as a central point, not as a source
The exhibition does not tell viewers what to think; it encourages them to perceive sounds, rhythms, and relationships that often remain beyond our attention. “We consider soil as a central point—a place where culture and nature, past and present, meet. It is a space we have long viewed as a servant, a resource, or a form of property. We now want to present it as a partner,” say curators Edith Jeřábková and Marianna Dobkowska on the intention of the exhibition.
The exhibition presents works by around thirty artists. Not only are their areas of interest highly diverse, but so are their artistic approaches. They work with film, installations, drawings, sound research, and live materials. Some employ scientific methods, constructing specialized microphones to record sounds beneath the earth’s surface, while others draw on personal experience with pasturage or the cultivation of new plant varieties.
Regenerative farming and the restoration of the “soil carbon fungi”—which involves the soil’s ability to retain water and store carbon through microbial processes and vegetation cover—are a major thematic section of the exhibition. The artworks explore relationships between pastures, herbivores, and microbial life in the soil, drawing attention back to pastoral cultures while highlighting the role of soil in stabilizing water cycles and cooling the planet.
For Ostrava
The field guide Toxic Dust by Berlin-based architect Rosario Talevi and Ostrava-based geologist Jan Lenart was created for Ostrava as part of the project. It maps the transformed post-industrial landscape of the city and explores new ways of establishing a relationship with such environments. Rather than adopting a moralizing perspective on ecological damage, it emphasizes the present-day life of these places and their potential for renewal.
The exhibition is connected to the public permaculture garden surrounding PLATO. As part of his project, artist Dávid Koronczi composted books and the resulting compost was later used by the gallery team in flowerbeds for the flowers featured in the exhibition. Other plants for the exhibition were provided by local growers, including Zdeněk Seidl, who in the past cultivated the iris variety Galerie Plato.
Keyhole, which is the smallest gallery room and has been connected to the garden since its inception, takes on a new role in the exhibition. It has become a “pocket garden”. Unlike in other parts of the gallery, here untouchable objects become touchable. This new pocket will change with the seasons, just like the garden itself. It was designed by CENTRALA, a Polish duo of architects Małgorzata Kuciewicz and Simone De Iacobis, and PLATO will maintain it for two years.
Attention to the urban wildlife
With this major exhibition, PLATO, the City Gallery of Contemporary Art, picks up on previous large and small projects, such as the exhibitions Heroic vs. Holistic (2017) by curators Daniela and Linda Dostálková, or Escaped, Found a Hideout, Still on the Run (2023) by curators Edith Jeřábková and Eva Koťátková. Their central focus—just like the continuous care the PLATO team devotes to the permaculture garden surrounding the gallery—is sharp attention to the environment, live nature, urban wildlife and a partner relationship with everyone and everything that lives with us on this planet.
The exhibition Soil and Friends aims to minimize its impact on the environment, which is why—with only a few exceptions—it is constructed from recycled materials originally used for film productions. Part of the project includes the Soil and Dust international conference and the 48 Hours on PLATO’s Soil sleepover in the garden. A separate press release will be issued for these events.
