Anabela Sládek — from the series I Am a Slovak Girl

Anabela Sládek Žilíková and her series titled I Am a Slovak Girl/Imaginary Slovak Peace – March 25, 1942reflect upon a rather unknown historical event from the period of the fascist Slovak State when on March 25, 1942, 999 Jewish girls and childless women were deported from the Poprad train station to Oświęcim. Only 20 of them survived. The artist tries to deal with this event as well as with the collective memory and identity of the nation. All of the auto portraits of the series are based on a coloured plaster cast of the head of a young Slovak bride dressed in folk costume and wearing a garland. It is from the 1930s and it is supposed to represent the model Aryan woman as well as the myth of Slovak identity based on folk traditions. The series consists of six versions of touched-up photographic auto portraits the artist projected onto a two-dimensional copy of the period Slovak bride wearing a richly decorated garland which used to be a standard part of the wedding costume. The young girl’s tragic face with closed and partially opened eyes reflects upon the artist’s sorrow and empathy toward the loss of these women and all of the other people murdered in the name of the racial policy of the wartime Slovak State. She uses her intimate experience of someone else’s suffering to metaphorically take upon herself the collective guilt of the nation and accepts it as her personal responsibility. In 2009, she created an installation of the same name and projected a random stream of numbers between 1000 and 1999 under the plaster cast of the Slovak folk bride in reference to the tattoos the Nazi inscribed on the arms of the Holocaust victims. They are supposed to remind us that behind each of the numbers there is a life that matters. Unlike the Slovak State that used the folk girl visual for their ideological propaganda, Sládek Žilíková utilised it to interpret her critical view of the fascist regime which masked its inhuman goals using a cultural program based on the deceitful glorification of the people and their culture. 

Anabela Sládek’s longterm focus is on various issues related to wartime Slovak State, especially themes that refer to nationalism, collective identity and responsibility to our history. On another level, she simultaneously focuses on personal and family history and after February 24, 2023, also on military aggression that tends to result into post-apocalyptic visions full of anxiety. While working  on her projections and site-specific installations, she utilises many different approaches (manipulated photography, computer graphics), but also new technologies (GPS art, generated image).