How is artificial intelligence reshaping the visual representation of our region? Opening on 14 October 2026, Natiömel Mušelm of Almostland and Gift Shop explores this question through an exhibition that is both an artistic project and a research experiment. Through the art of a fictional country, the project examines how the cultural heritage of the Visegrad Four (V4) region is represented in global AI systems.

The exhibition is the result of an international collaboration involving students participating in a course organised by the MOME Research Centre. Participants from Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia worked together to investigate the impact of AI on cultural representation and to develop the exhibition's curatorial concept. The exhibition brings together artworks by artists from across the region.

Almostland is a country that does not exist, yet feels strangely familiar. Its visual identity incorporates recognisable elements of Central and Eastern European cultural heritage, although these cannot be attributed to any single country. As the region's cultural heritage remains underrepresented in global visual datasets, AI systems frequently merge traditions, motifs and cultural references from different countries. These ambiguous cultural associations form the conceptual thread connecting the exhibited works.

The exhibition makes this phenomenon tangible, revealing how the cultural heritage of the Visegrad countries is interpreted and reconstructed through AI-generated imagery. The result is a visual world that appears almost authentic, yet never entirely so. In response to this phenomenon, the project establishes a fictional national museum for Almostland.

The project is the outcome of educational and cultural cooperation among the Visegrad countries. Participating students attended Images, Culture and AI: A Critical Making Studio, a course offered by the Heritage in Motion Lab at the MOME Research Centre and led by Dr Brigitta Iványi-Bitter during the spring semester of 2026. Bringing together students from different disciplines and national backgrounds, the course combined artistic practice with critical research. The exhibition emerged from this collaborative process as a means of making the limitations and inaccuracies of AI-generated imagery more accessible and perceptible to wider audiences.

The curatorial team consists of students from Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland, while the exhibition features works by Czech, Polish, Slovak, Hungarian and other international artists.

Among the exhibited works is a series of embroidered images by Zsófia Szász, based on found photographs and their AI-generated reconstructions. Panna Csombók's dysfunctional baseball cap can be encountered in the Gift Shop. Presented exclusively in the online exhibition, Jiří Phillipe Janda's AI-generated video I Had a Pretty Good Childhood constructs a fictional narrative around the immediate surroundings of the university in Ústí nad Labem. Karolina Chandler's Family Atlas explores nostalgia associated with home and the unsettling boundary between reality and fiction. Klaudie Kirvelová's works, also presented in the online exhibition, examine how artificial intelligence transforms our perceptions of traditional Czech folk costumes and cultural heritage. Meanwhile, Marcus Lister's three-legged stork offers a playful alternative to even the most ambitious national branding campaigns.