Ztohoven

Often described as a guerrilla public art group, Ztohoven is a collective of artists in the Czech Republic that enacts “pranks” meant to stir the public media. The group’s name, an apt pun, “Ztohoven” translates to both “the way out” and “the hundred shits.” Quoting Ztohoven figurehead Roman Tyc, Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times has argued that the group possesses a typical Czech approach to politics and even dissent. Ztohoven’s wild pranks range from hacking into a public broadcast on television and showing a fake nuclear “mushroom cloud,” to sneaking into the nation’s esteemed capitol building, Prague Castle, and putting up a monumental neon heart (which would flash a question-mark symbol at certain intervals) to symbolize the national feeling of confusion and anxiety at the end of the beloved Vaclav Havel’s presidency in 2003.

While multiple leaders of the group have faced jail-time for these acts of artistic tomfoolery (sometimes critically understood as civil dissent), their pranks are widely received as humorous by the Czech population, known for their sense of humor and long history of pride in dissent movements— from the Hussite uprisings in the 15th century, to the anti-Soviet “Velvet Revolution” in 1989. Ztohoven exemplifies the practice of “culture jamming,” in which the group’s art and actions manipulate and alter the meaning of objects, entities, and shared semiotic associations in the public sphere.