Untitled Exhibition (A Visual Ballad About a Small Country)

In 2025, Nitra Gallery will celebrate its 60th birthday. Since its inception, the institution’s collection fund has been keeping records of our collective memory, which has been (un)intentionally captured in the miscellaneousness of the collection fund. The gallery’s collections contain almost five thousand items. Sadly, the gallery still does not have its own building and its exhibition possibilities are limited due to the insufficient capacity of its (restored) exhibition spaces.

The Untitled Exhibition (A Visual Ballad About a Small Country) is the first of a series of exhibitions prepared specifically for the gallery’s 60th anniversary will allow the visitor to explore over 200 works which depict us as a society, nation and an individual. We have selected a few themes that try and archive the (inter)regional history. It tries to consciously deal with the omnipresent and (in)visible “agricultural complex” (or the agrarian complex of building a collection). Nitra Gallery is an institution whose professional focus is (also) on collecting and exhibiting different values of the past, so it can readily confront them with contemporary ideas. The exhibited pieces are supposed to engage in a (retro)fitted mutual dialogue – a correlation (or constellation). We try and keep an open mind while reading multiple cultural stories, highlighting art’s ability to emphasise our inferiority and superiority while also trying to get over ourselves. It also tries to stimulate the visitor’s mind. The exhibition does not have a set period of time. The oldest exhibits are from the 18th century, with their legacy and context still being up-to-date. The youngest pieces have been created just recently. The visualised past opens up questions about the future in the present. It captures issues which are always up-to-date – as feelings of freedom of an individual and their position within their family, job, country. Threats of wars, conflicts, pandemics, hunger, fear, sadness from the (nuclear, environmental, (non)democratic, hybrid) end of the world. The exhibited pieces represent an ambiguous report about us from today’s perspective. Every piece has its own meaning, place, while keeping in mind specific period politics, the artist’s given state of mind, but also the circumstances that had led to it. A broad spectrum of works presents different artists with their different ways of thinking. From artists heavily focused on the region of Nitra and Slovakia, all the way to multiple personalities of European importance. The Untitled Exhibition (A Visual Ballad About a Small Country) and its narrative focus on the thought processes of an individual, man, representative of a young, unexperienced nation. It opens different questions about us and explores our relationships, ideas and notions. The exhibition offers a specific compassion and exploration of different issues. This curatorial introspection allows us to explore our own (and the institution’s) history. The visitor will learn that “the historical Slovak from the gallery collection” is not that different from the contemporary one living in the post-era. Love, family, fight, power, education, hope(lessness), strong affinity to land and magical spirituality are present in both historical and contemporary art and the following rule has remained true: like family, like village, like village, like country… Every exhibition room covers a certain theme, matter, issue or feeling. Despite the exhibition halls being this specifically defined and physically separated, they supplement each other and carry a common theme of our country and the place of an individual in it. Different interpretation options of the given themes within the exhibited works create a web of mutual overlaps. The connection is not just linear, but also within the spacetime of our history, traditions, proverbs, families and mutual relationships, feelings and our idealised future.