To Love Like Everyone Else

The exhibition To Love Like Everyone Else focuses on the relationship of love and radical reception and what Freud identified as “das Unheimliche” on a material level. Rovňák has borrowed the exhibition title from the French writer and photographer Hervé Guibert and it is supposed to reflect on the position of the LGBTQI community in Slovakia. 

The exhibition will present an overview of his work from the last eight years, textile objects and canvases as textile objects where the artist also utilises textiles from the female part of his family, including bed sheets. These canvases are accompanied by photographs and videos documenting micro-performances in a space which serves as the artist’s studio and home at the same time and which he also shares with his partner. 

The sphere of intimacy intersects with the public sphere here and Rovňák takes interest in the ethical and political aspects of love, as if it was a textile book with embroideries of ancient techniques of taking care of ourselves and at the same time, he uses this meditative technique to produce them. His work To Love Like Everyone Else (2023) is a follow-up to his earlier Corsets (2001) and reopens the matter of the position of the LGBTQI community in Slovakia, which has been historically not just ignored, but actually bullied despite them just demanding basic rights for themselves.

The dynamics between domesticity and acceptance and the oppressive, which stays hidden, but sometimes surfaces, culminates in Rovňák’s new experimental film Das Grosse (2023), which he created with the help of artificial intelligence. It is based on Rilke’s novel, declaiming fragments of The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.