My body is a record of forgetfulness

Online opening of the exhibition via Instagram studio.intermedia.akapela

Pistori Palace, Štefánikova 25, 81105 Bratislava

Exhibiting authors: Zoltán Baráth, Jakub Ďurian, Coco Chmelár and Michaela Cingelová, Matej Grznár, Michaela Kacsiová, Vivien Kvasnicová and Sarah Valovičová, Michaela Prablesková, Tatiana Takáčová, Jakub Užovič, Alexander Zigo

Curator: Miroslava Urbanová

Exhibition architecture: Matej Gavula

Visual communication of the exhibition: Michal Chrastina, abcdefghch.studio

Production: Roman Bicek, Jana Kapelová

The exhibition of students of the Intermedia Studio at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava is supplemented by a text that begins conventionally, with an opening sentence about its actors, gender-correct actors and the common place of their current institutional activity. Its self-referentiality is not an end in itself, it refers to the consciousness of the shackles of language, its conventions, the pursuit of correctness, it feels their bondage and overall weight. The author of the text is based on the theory of so-called embodied cognition, the conditionality of one's cognition throughout the body, the corporeality of mental representations, and the language itself. The material for memory here is not primarily represented by drawers full of old photos, but rather various references and feelings in time and space, perceived on a multisensory level, are always available for re-transformation with new intensity.

In the search for generalizations and summaries on the list of characteristics of the exhibiting authors, the tangible view of the world around and within us, the observation of tangled or disturbed social threads, intertwined with their individual experience, tangibly tangled. They are looking for means and ways to make the places of emotional abrasions and indices of (absence of) trauma visible. If we were to visualize this generational view, it would certainly not be a strict monochrome, but rather a bruise, a touch-sensitive gradient. They are therefore interested not in the idealized, but rather in the abject shades from the scale of our own experience, inextricably linked to our corporeality. They choose borderline situations of physical and mental stress, use available intimate material, entangle it in clumps of relationships and contexts. They try to mediate their non-verbal nodes, to spread them through performative situations. They drill in open wounds after toxic relationships, they squirm on the shallow impossibility of concentration, drenched in a flood of pixels called ''poor images''. Trapping in the social networks that dominate our perception, which we are localizing in new repositories today. How do the new online interfaces of our experience actually change our processes of remembering, our social ties, and cognition as such? Gradually, they realize that they will not only reach the sensation as the main characters and heroines of their own marginal and often marginalized story. Only through a critical understanding of all versions of what we perceive as a reality within the inexhaustible filters and inequalities of today's societies can one get to a place with a more comprehensive outlook, an uncomfortable edge. And it rings the same for everyone.

Miroslava Urbanová

The exhibition was financially supported from its resources by the Bratislava self-governing region.

The project for the application for a financial contribution was co-developed by Nina Vidovencová.