mutual benefits

The theme Mutual Benefits for Pragovka Gallery’s international exhibition program in 2026 offers an opportunity to reflect on the various forms collaboration, sharing, and reciprocity can take in today's world — across art, society, nature, and technology.

We are interested in projects that explore reciprocity in natural systems — such as symbiosis, mutualism, and other models of coexistence and cooperation within ecosystems — and examine how these principles can be reflected in the context of climate crisis and ecological depletion. We welcome projects that deal with human relationships, collective processes, shared authorship, responsibility, care, and solidarity, as well as issues of participation and collective creation. We are also open to projects focusing on alternative economies — barter, gifting, community-based and circular models of value and resource sharing. The theme Mutual Benefits also includes broader ecosystems of cooperation across species and technologies, including questions of ethics, agency, and relationships with more-than-human actors. We are equally interested in the dynamics of collaboration between artists, curators, institutions, and audiences, and in approaches that reconsider cultural infrastructures as networks of mutual support.

We ask critical questions: what are the risks and limits of reciprocity? Where does collaboration end and exploitation begin? What do compromises mean, and how can different interests be balanced in collective projects?

The topic Mutual Benefits explores interdependence and collaboration across human and more-than-human systems. It focuses on care processes, shared responsibility, and sustainability that shape the dynamics of ecological, social, and political communities. By analyzing internal structures and invisible processes, it emphasizes how mutual relationships can bring benefit to all involved — from human actors to natural ecosystems. Projects may address not only external forms of collaboration but also internal processes of care, regeneration, and transformation, which are crucial to long-term sustainability.

This approach highlights the importance of moving beyond hierarchical relationships toward models of mutual support and reciprocity, where the well-being of the individual and the whole are interconnected. It explores how shared practices of care and ecology can serve as tools to strengthen communities while protecting the fragile ecosystems in which we live.