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Two years after the 1989 revolution, the Fulbright Commission in the Czech Republic was established, offering scholarships to students, lecturers, researchers, high-school teachers and educational administrators. Americans are invited to study, lecture or work on projects in the Czech Republic, and Czechs are invited to do the same in the United States. Since the inception of the program, more than 450 Czechs and almost 400 Americans have participated.

Both exhibits feature a mix of Czechs and Americans, showing either new or past works (from their Fulbright period) in photography, video, sculpture and installation. At Communication Space Školská 28, Czech participants include Hynek Alt and Aleksandra Vajd, Marian Beneš, Kamila Housová-Mizerová, Helena Lukas, Libuše Rudinská and Petra Valentová alongside Americans Joseph Cahill, Robert Rustermier, Lisa Moren, Barbara Tetenbaum and Carolanne Patterson.

At the entrance of Školská 28, Marian Beneš's photographic series "Bohemian National Hall" (2003–05) best captures the essence of the exhibition. Beneš seems to have discovered his home away from home by photographing the empty rooms and halls of the decrepit Bohemian National Hall, a Renaissance Revival building from the late 1800s in New York City. His five large color photos reveal peeling paint and rotted stairways, providing an apt documentation of the end of an era in Czechoslovak history, and not just in the United States.

Joseph Cahill seems to have re-evaluated the impact of his home and culture abroad. His video installation The Night Fisherman (2006) is set on an eerie river amid fog and dead trees. There is a man rowing against the current, toward the viewer. On a large table above the video, there is a model of a dried forest with brown lumpy hills.

Cahill's video is a sequence from an upcoming science fiction film he's making about the hegemony of the English language and a hero who turns into a mouse. Cahill, who decided to stay in the Czech Republic after his fellowship, says that his film is rooted in the changes taking place in the Czech Republic and other societies being bombarded by imported pop-culture "ambassadors" on billboards and in the mass media. Along the path, traditions of society have been trampled underfoot by a quest for hypermodernity, and uncovering the footprints of previous generations will reveal the story of how we came to "this wilderness, this river of no return."

Robert Rustermier's untitled installation with magnets (2006) seemingly addresses the same issues but takes a different tack. His piece is a mini high-wire act of dual magnetic tension. Unbridled attraction and incompatibility are also byproducts of long-separated cultures coming together, especially Czechs and Americans since 1989.

The most intriguing piece at the Školská 28 exhibition is Petra Valentová's Table/Sami&me (2006), a seemingly inconspicuous black wrought-iron table with two chairs. However, the glowing yellow tabletop reveals realistic images of exotic foods, such as sushi, spicy chicken, several half-eaten Mexican dishes and other plates beside an uncooked head of a pig and a baby pig tied and bound, awaiting the butcher. There is audio accompaniment to this piece — voices (in English) of friends having dinner, one reading a recipe aloud, then asking for help in the kitchen to chop onions or set the table. The sound of frying food almost makes one's mouth water, if you can manage to block out the images of the dead pigs.

The strongest contributions to this show suggest that the cultural exchange has had a profound effect on the Fulbright recipients. Several blocks away from Školská 28, Galerie Nová síň presents the equally engaging works of Pavel Baňka, Vratislav K. Novák, Petr Stanický, and Lucie Tatarová from the Czech Republic and Americans Susan Ewing, Matthew Monteith, Robert Rustermier and Barbara Benish, who now lives in south Bohemia. Benish essentially represents both countries at this point in her career, and this significant transformation in her life and work it is at least partially due to the Fulbright program.