Zorka Lednarova’s exhibition gives visitors a troubling perspective on the difficulties wheelchair users encounter navigating Czech and Slovak cities.
The Artivist Lab gallery in Prague’s bustling center appears empty upon entering. But a large painting and a screen soon come into view. The screen shows a woman lying on a canvas while assistants move her arms and legs back and forth. With every movement, paint spreads across the canvas, gradually revealing the final product – the painting of a colorful angel.
By looking through a partially blocked doorway into a second room, one can see a more troubling scene. A video projection shows the same woman, now sitting in a wheelchair. And she is engaged in a heated debate with two police officers.
The argument is taking place in front of a downtown police station, and two large gray barriers are blocking her access to the entrance. The officers angrily point first at the barriers – painted to look like concrete and placed there by Zorka and others helping her – and then at a disability-assistance bell. She responds by showing that she cannot physically reach it from her wheelchair, and by gesturing to where the bell should be installed so she can call for assistance.
For all intents and purposes, one of Prague’s main police stations is inaccessible to the woman.
What is unfolding onscreen for the viewer – a person’s inability to enter a public space – is recreated for real inside the gallery. Knee-high boxes in two doorways block visitors from moving freely from one space to another. Forced to stop and observe the video from a distance, visitors symbolically experience, even if only for a moment, what everyday life looks like for wheelchair users.
The obstacles, together with the video, the video/painting pair Angel, and an educational workshop, form Kde končí svoboda (Where Freedom Ends), the latest statement against inaccessibility and exclusion by Zorka Lednarova – the woman featured in both videos.
“I wanted to draw attention to the fact that even one small step can be an insurmountable obstacle for a person in a wheelchair,” Zorka explains. “Most people are not aware of this, but this is exactly how exclusion occurs – a person remains on the edge of social life.”
The Art of Deconstructing Barriers
When Zorka was nine years old, she decided she wanted to become an artist. In art she saw the possibility of finally being free and independent from the Czechoslovak communist system that imprisoned her grandfather for his beliefs. Years passed, the communist regime eventually fell, and Zorka followed her dream.
Zorka says she became a committed artist and began merging her work with activism in the late 1980s, while still in her early teens. By the ’90s, her work focused on environmental issues, migration, politics, and social change. But after being diagnosed with a rare form of muscular dystrophy, she began to use her art as a platform to advocate for people with disabilities.
“When I got sick, I quickly realized that people with disabilities have virtually no voice,” Zorka told Transitions. “After the fall of communism, very little has changed for this group. Many are dependent on state assistance and are afraid to speak up.”
Zorka had no intention of living on the margins of society. With the same determination she exhibited as a youth pursuing her dreams, she turned to activism. The goal: to deconstruct invisible barriers made of prejudice, misunderstanding, and lack of interest toward people with disabilities living in a society still not built for them.
Challenging Limitations
The project Where Freedom Ends began last year by mapping public spaces that remain inaccessible to wheelchair users in Prague 1, the heartbeat of the heavily touristed city. Through friends, social media, disability organizations, and accessibility platforms, Zorka collected photographs and locations of inaccessible places, which she then personally visited.
Eventually, she selected services that should be available to all – a pharmacy, bank, cinema, police station, healthcare facility, the city’s transportation authority, and its gas and electricity provider. Together with students from Charles University and the Academy of Fine Arts, she installed barriers in front of the buildings housing the selected services, symbolically blocking access to all citizens. Zorka documented the whole process through a body camera, and later incorporated the images into the video shown at her exhibition.
Reversing roles and temporarily placing others in the position of wheelchair users disrupted the normal functioning of the spaces and provoked a wide range of reactions. She encountered misunderstanding, defensiveness, and attempts to shift responsibility by some employees who insisted the lack of accessibility was not their fault. In Ostrava, another Czech city where she carried out the project, some shop owners even called the police on her. At the same time, there were also positive reactions – from passersby expressing concern about how difficult Prague is for wheelchair users, to institutions promising to improve accessibility.
“Their own experience is the best way to understand,” Zorka says of her approach of giving people a firsthand perspective of what it is like to navigate a Czech city in a wheelchair. This can be by symbolically blocking access to public spaces, or by allowing others to try using wheelchairs – as she did during a workshop at the Academy of Fine Arts two days before the opening of Where Freedom Ends.
But the project also aims to challenge what Zorka describes as “mental barriers” that contribute to a non-inclusive environment – the lack of awareness, poor urban planning, and the tendency to treat accessibility as an added feature rather than a necessity. At the same time, through the work Angel, Zorka explores the limitations of the human body itself. Using the symbolic figure of an angel, the piece captures “movement, pain, surrender of control, and the inexorable limits of a sick body.”
When Art Meets Activism
Artivist Lab founder Tamara Moyzes and Zorka have been friends since childhood. They grew up living steps away from each other in the same city in Slovakia, and both were raised by inspiring and intellectual families. Through the years, the girls each developed a passion for art. Tamara’s own path led her to explore how art and activism can be connected through the practice of “artivism.” In her artist statement, Tamara talks about artivism as a novelty through which she thematizes activists’ efforts in the field of art, introducing the public to a new language of creative radical performance.
Zorka’s artworks embody the concept of artivism: “I try to raise awareness with every exhibition, whether through programs for schools or for gallery visitors,” Zorka says. “Accessibility is not an ‘extra requirement,’ it is a basic human right.”
Where Freedom Ends is itself part of a bigger project on the mental and physical barriers in the path toward construction of an inclusive world.
As part of this long-running project called Cesta mesta (Path / Cities), Zorka printed stickers of a wheelchair symbol crossed by a red line and stuck them on Slovak police stations, healthcare facilities, post offices, and shops lacking accessible entrances for wheelchair users.
“Reactions were different. Some were upset and wanted to tear the sticker down immediately, others kept it and it has been there to this day,” Zorka says. “However, there were also positive cases when people built a ramp or lowered the threshold after our intervention.”
A second, and more provocative, set of stickers declared “I am an egotistical beast, I don’t know how to park.” That message was placed on cars that were either parked in spaces for wheelchairs or blocking lowered curbs.
She continues, “A person in a wheelchair has no real freedom of choice. I simply can’t get into most shops, cafes, or restaurants. It is extremely frustrating and mentally exhausting, especially when I know that change would be easy and quick.”
Constant Battles?
There are moments that give Zorka hope that change is possible. She recalls one intervention in front of Prague’s Ponrepo Cinema, located in the city’s Old Town. The building was technically “accessible” because it had a disability assistance bell – but the bell itself was installed too high for a wheelchair user to reach. After she pointed this out, the bell was soon moved down. Without assistance, she explains, she would not have been able to enter because the building had no wheelchair ramp and she was unable to signal for help.
But change remains slow.
Situations like steep ramps or poorly placed assistance buttons are common even at spaces that are accessible on paper, but in reality are out of reach. Tamara explains that although EU regulations require public institutions to improve accessibility – and grants are often available for such projects – many institutions make changes without consulting wheelchair users themselves or organizations that work with them.
In many places, improvements are not attempted at all. When asked how often inaccessibility affects her life, Zorka answers simply: every day. Among the most common problems are broken elevators, poorly lowered curbs, non-existent or non-functional wheelchair-accessible toilets, inaccessible metro stations, potholes, and bumpy cobbled streets that make movement dangerous or impossible.
The problems, however, go beyond physical movement. “A healthy person cannot imagine how many actions a person in a wheelchair has to perform to get anywhere,” Zorka says.
It can involve days of planning – checking whether buildings are barrier-free, elevators functional, toilets accessible. Traveling by train means booking a specific connection in advance and waiting for approval to ensure that a wheelchair space is available. Unlike other passengers, she cannot simply change plans spontaneously or take a different train home if she wants to.
“Most people are not aware of this, because for them an obstacle is just something they will go around or jump over,” Zorka says.
As a result, many wheelchair users remain isolated at home. Inaccessible spaces keep them excluded from public life, and because they are rarely seen, the changes and conditions that could improve their lives continue to be overlooked.
Unfortunately, Zorka says, people with disabilities do not have the power or influence in society to push for legal changes or pressure politicians into action on their own. “Therefore, it is important that healthy people also stand up for them and demand a change in policy,” Zorka says. “Unless there is strong political will to create a barrier-free environment, we will never achieve true freedom of movement.”
Health Migrant
Conditions in her home country forced Zorka to move abroad even though she never wanted to do so. She says the Slovak healthcare system, including the dearth of basic equipment, medicines, accessible infrastructure, and sufficient support services, eventually pushed her to move to Germany.
In Berlin, where she lives, wheelchair users and people with disabilities are completely integrated into society and receive support that allows them to live almost independently, she says. Compared to Slovakia, she says she doesn’t “feel like a fourth-class person.”
Zorka believes one explanation for why accessibility conditions in Slovakia and other nearby countries still lag behind lies in the region’s lasting ideological legacy. During socialism, she says, people with disabilities were often segregated from public life – children were placed in separate schools, while many adults were institutionalized – and cities and infrastructure were rarely designed with them in mind because they were largely absent from public view.
Such thinking is still evident in today’s society, she says. In Berlin, she encounters dozens of wheelchair users every day, while during a two-week stay in Prague she says she saw only a handful of them. In Bratislava, she says, she might see only one or two in an entire month – a sign that many still cannot move through cities freely enough to be visible in everyday life.
Nevertheless, she acknowledges that countries such as Poland and the Czech Republic have made noticeable progress in recent years.
Accessibility improvements in the Czech Republic vary from region to region, as well as between different districts of the capital city itself. Prague 1, the city center, with its narrow streets, historic buildings, and cobblestones, remains particularly difficult both for wheelchair users and for accessibility adaptation.
Stepan Lohr, a deputy director of the Asistence organization that provides personal assistance and social rehabilitation to wheelchair users, explains that cobblestones can be dangerous for people using mechanical wheelchairs because thin wheels can become trapped in the gaps between the stones, while even small curbs may become insurmountable barriers for electric wheelchairs.
According to Lohr, the most visible improvements in Prague have been made in public transportation. Over the past 10 to 15 years, elevators have been installed at many previously inaccessible metro stations, and many trams and buses can now lower boarding platforms to ease entry for wheelchair users. At the moment, 48 out of 61 metro stations are accessible. Still, as the city transport authority admits, wheelchair users find it “complicated if not impossible” to move around in places lacking barrier-free access.
Educating for Change
As Zorka points out, the possibility of living in an accessible space is based on human decisions.
“An ideal city would use the principles of design for all. If a space is designed for everyone from the start, nothing needs to be redesigned,” she says. “Money can always be found. It is just a question of priorities. And people with disabilities are, unfortunately, always at the bottom of the list.”
The key for Zorka to ensure her art actually has an impact on society is education. “I always try to work with students or pupils so that the project also has an educational dimension,” she says. A workshop Zorka held with students of Prague’s Academy of Fine Arts in cooperation with artist and head of New Media II department Katerina Olivova, was designed to make them experience what it means to be forced to move around a building in a wheelchair.
Students’ answers to a questionnaire showed that they now had a deeper understanding of what kind of barriers were present in the art school where they spend so much time.
Students were now able to recognize less visible and less obvious barriers – such as high thresholds or narrow doorways – that often remain unnoticed by the majority of people, yet for wheelchair users these seemingly small details can make movement through space difficult or even impossible.
But Where Freedom Ends also carries the message that just as humans are capable of building barriers, they can also deconstruct them, turning the concept of accessibility into a demonstration of human empathy and understanding.
“It is important for society to realize that we did not choose our situation. Being sick and dependent on empathy and help from society is a very heavy burden,” Zorka says.
“It is incomprehensible to me when society puts additional obstacles in the way of people with disabilities instead of understanding and support.”
Credit: Artivist Lab
Where Freedom Ends is on display at Artivist Lab in Prague until 14 June. Until 2 August Zorka Lednarova’s works will also be displayed at Artwall, an outdoor exhibition space running along the Kapitana Jarose Embankment and Edvard Benes Embankment.
Bernarda Frankovic is an editorial intern at Transitions. She is studying toward a degree in communication, media, and journalism at University North in Croatia.
Laura Savoini is an editorial intern at Transitions. She is studying for an Erasmus Mundus master’s in journalism.
