Head of Franz Kafka, Kinetic sculpture in New Town, Czech Republic
The Head of Franz Kafka is a moving sculpture at the entrance to Quadrio Shopping Center in the New Town district of Prague. It is made up of 42 stainless steel panels that rotate and shape the face of a well-known literary figure.
David Černý unveiled this installation in October 2014, adding it to the series of his works throughout the Czech capital. The piece came after a long planning process and quickly became a notable point in the urban art scene.
This installation takes the name of a Prague-born writer whose fiction reached readers around the world and who remains one of the central figures in modern storytelling. His narratives often deal with individuals trapped in systems they cannot fully understand, and that tension between person and structure finds an echo in the moving construction of this work.
The sculpture rotates between eight in the morning and nine in the evening and is clearly visible from the public square. The metro station Národní třída is just a few steps away and makes reaching the site straightforward.
Inside the structure, twenty-one motors control roughly one kilometer (about 3,280 feet) of cable that moves each individual steel ring. The weight of the entire construction reaches thirty-nine tons, even though the metal looks light and almost floating from the outside.
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