Jana Kapelová: When you´re trying to understand a story in which you´re the main character

Where?

• MEDIUM Gallery,

• Hviezdoslavovo nám. 18, Bratislava

When?

• Opening: 16 April 2025, 19:00

• Exhibition duration: 17 April – 25 May 2025

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Curator:

Eliška Mazalanová

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Annotation

What do we consider to be happiness and how do we strive to achieve personal fulfillment? How do we relate to others but especially to ourselves? What are the sources of our fears and anxieties?

Forgotten and repressed experiences that are difficult, and at first sometimes impossible, to rationally understand or define, come to the surface and are recalled in unconscious gestures and spontaneous reactions. They speak in body language. They emerge and try to manifest themselves in situations, fragmented micro-stories. Perhaps they are familiar to many of us. Will you try to pay attention to them? Although you may never understand them as a whole, you will probably have more understanding for yourself as their main character.

The exhibition presents works that Jana Kapelová has created over the last three years, in which she shifts her attention inside (of herself). Three videos are presented here as a continuum of one projection surface. In a retrospect, they can be seen as a gradually conscious process. From external observation to introspective exploration; from the future to the past, all the way back to the period of one's own childhood. Something like a reverse chronology.

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Jana Kapelová

Jana Kapelová is a visual artist and a pedagogue. Her work deals with themes such as work and precarization, leisure and self-realization, and reflects on the influence of social and cultural environment, upbringing and education on individuals and society. She works predominantly with the medium of video, delegated performances, text, participatory art and performative lectures. She uses formats of artistic research, questionnaires and interviews in her work. In her pedagogical practice she opts for an individual approach, respectful communication and elements of feminist pedagogy. Since 2019, she has been co-running the Intermedia Studio at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava. From 2017 to 2019 she was the director of the Medium Gallery, from 2011 to 2015 she taught at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, from 2011 to 2014 she coordinated the Slovak part of the online platform Artyčok tv. In 2014 she became the winner of the Oskar Čepan Award. She has exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Slovakia, Hungary, Austria, Czech Republic, Romania, Germany, Switzerland, USA, Japan, Sweden. Her works are represented in the collections of Slovak galleries.

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Peter Tilajčík

Peter Tilajčík is an actor and teacher. In his work, he deals with productions based on authorial, movement and performative principles, exploring the influence and relationship between different types of art (music, photography, performance, puppet theatre, painting, sculpture, object). He graduated from the Theatre Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava, majoring in puppetry. He is the director of the Stoka and H.R.H. Theatre, dramaturge of the Bratislava Puppet Theatre and guest artist in several independent theatres (Nude Theatre, Uhol_92, DPM, NoMantinels). He has participated in several international and domestic theatre festivals, including the New York Fringe Festival, Přelet nad loutkářským hnízdem Prague, International Theatre Festival Divadelná Nitra, Nová Dráma/New Drama, Wiener Festwochen. He has taught at the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava and worked at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava.

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Eliška Mazalanová

Eliška Mazalanová is an art historian and curator, she received her PhD from the Faculty of Philosophy at Charles University in Prague; she is also the co-founder and current vice-chair of the Cultural Unions, which were founded in May 2024. Her research focuses on topics such as socially and environmentally engaged art, collaborative practice, as well as the inner workings of the art world and artistic operations, especially with regard to the working conditions, precarity, or equal opportunities and related forms of collective association or unionisation of cultural workers. Among other things, she collaborates with tranzit.sk.

This project was financially supported by Bratislava Self-Governing Region.

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Partners:

This project is financially supported by the Bratislava Self-Governing Region.

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