Information
Exhibiting artists
Martina Chudá, Peter Lančarič
Curator
Peter Molari
Visual identity
Dávid Šima
Opening
Wednesday, 12 Sept 2018, 5:30 pm
Duration
13 Sept – 28 Oct, 2018
Venue
Youth Gallery
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Funding
With financial support of the Slovak Arts Council public funds. The Council is the leading partner of the project.
They incorporate many material and formal approaches they have adopted throughout their art careers. She is a textile artist, while he is a photographer. They keep looking for any common grounds and try and expand them: from found object to installation, from photography to video, from document to feature… They use their personal experience to combine intimate with impersonal and even ironical views of their subject matter.
Even the exhibition space itself with its spiral staircase and “material base” in the form of documentary installation offer the visitors an opportunity to look for various levels of explorations and search for answers. However, it does not include any grandiose finale or a universal answer. It all ends in a loop… While this part can be perceived as a move from something specific to something generic, a darkened room with an installation inside of it represents a turn to an intimate experience of a personal tragedy.
The artists are not trying to demythologise this phenomenon. They rather use introspection in order to move towards more generic levels which allow to ask questions about relationships as precisely defined bonds that are set by gender, religious or other social norms. Whether we are actually able to experience eternal love or whether we are trapped in a loop of infantile relationship games. By leaving a word out from a famous clause, they open this ironical game of options, if it actually must be death that do us apart. It might as well be something completely different, even love…
Martina Chudá (born in Hlohovec, 1990) practises visual art in various forms – objects, installations, even performances and video (only rarely painting). Her works mostly incorporate textile, although it is not compulsory, but rather a conceptual approach that allows for the material and form to be determined by the content. The content itself is intimate, sometimes ironic, criticising and feministic positive. Martina Chudá works gently with material symbolism, metaphors and ambiguousness. She graduated from animation and pedagogy of visual arts. Since 2015, she has been a member of the Slovak Union of Visual Arts, specifically the Slovak Textile Artists Association. She exhibited at various international group exhibitions (Textile Art of Today 2015 and 2018 / SK, CZ, PL, HU; International Mini Textile Exhibition/ Textile Memory 2015 – UMELKA Gallery and Gallery S.V.Ú. Mánes Prague; Nearby – Faraway 2017 – UMELKA Gallery). In August 2016, she held a solo exhibition CAMOUFLAGE in an alternative exhibition space in Trnava (The Shop Window Gallery). She lives and works in Trnava.
Peter Lančarič (born in Trnava, 1989) is a photographer. His work suggests he is the kind of artist who lives for photography. His photographies are an extract of self-reflection in an intimate diary of his personal life. Image poetics have become his main research tool. In his later works, the artist tries to capture man’s spirit through the concept of visualising the identity of an individual or a group. His artworks incorporate many autobiographic features. However, he also does documentary and journalistic photography. He often socialises objective reality and covers Slovak DIY culture. At the moments, he is finishing his doctoral studies (under prof. Jozef Sedlák) at theDepartment of Artistic Communicationat the Faculty of Mass Media Communication at the University of Ss. Cyril and Methodius in Trnava. His research focuses on sociological and intermedia aspects of portrait photography. He is very active in Trnava – he co-founded a community and art centre “Kubik nápadov” and a public space gallery – the Shop Window Gallery. Since 2012, he has held several solo exhibitions. He is also open to conceptual and intermedia overlaps, for example the Exhibition in the Crapper(2015) and the Expositionexhibition (2017) that both engaged in social criticism. In 2016, he participated at a photography workshop in Paris titled Les 400 Vues. In 2017, he exhibited at a group exhibition of the finalists of the World Biennial of Student Photographyat theMuseum of Contemporary Art of Vojvodina in Novi Sad. Together with Jindřich Štreit, he is participating at a series of exhibitions dedicated to the “Držme spolu” [Keep together] project (2018) that ironises the insufficiencies of Slovak social welfare and health care systems. Lančarič uses photographies of patients suffering from coma vigile to talk about inner strength and man’s never-ending hope.
