Katarína Bajkayová, Klaudia Kosziba, Paula Malinowska: Will I Ever Look Into Your Eyes Again?

Where:

• Šopa gallery

  • Hlavná 40, Košice

When:

• Opening: March 14 at 6p.m.

  • Duration: till April 30, 2024

 

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Curator

• Erik Vilím

 

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Annotation

The exhibition in the Šopa gallery connects the work of three authors - Katarína Bajkayová, Paula Malinowská and Klaudia Kosziba. Despite different media (ceramics, painting, 3D digital animation), their interests have been meeting for a long time. The current exhibition opportunity in Košice gave this silent dialogue clearer contours. The authors tell small stories of organisms, where the actresses are jellyfish or different types of mushrooms. Omniscient narrators are not found here, even some are stopped in time, frozen and communicating only with their material, shape or brush marks (Bajkayová, Kosziba). On the stage of 54 square meters, themes of transformation, rebirth, eroticism, sex or some kind of strange foreign love are slowly revealed. Bajkayová, Malinowska and Kosziba simply test our sensitivity and think about the possibilities of seeing again in nature a full essential life.

The name of the exhibition is inspired by an excerpt from the song The End by the band The Doors. As accompanying material, an essay by curator Erik Vilím will be available in the gallery space, in which he opens up the mentioned topics in deeper philosophical contours. In this text, he offers viewers the key to interpreting the entire exhibition - the word love. This more demanding text will be supplemented as part of the accompanying program by a lecture by Václav Janoščík, a teacher, theorist and curator who currently works at the Academy of Arts in Prague

 

Paula Malinowska (*1998)

graduated with a master's degree at the Department of Intermedia at the University of Fine Arts and DesignBratislava (2020–2022), specifically in the vvv studio (Dávid Koronczi and Martin Piaček). She derives her creations from the theme of the Anthropocene and our relationship with non-human reality. She interprets this issue through mythology, which he "undermines" with a new reading and uncovers its new connections.

In the current author's project for Šopa gallery, she works again with 3D animation, the main character of which is a jellyfish that she found while walking on the beach in Portugal in June 2023. The video art work itself was created at a time when the author was processing the loss of a loved one. The themes of death, disappearance and creation and the constant cycle thus naturally found their way into the presented video art work. The starting point for Malinowska was the mythological story about the Medusa from Greek mythology. However, this story almost completely disappears in the work, and the author focuses on a living actress - a jellyfish, which has the ability to revive. Against this background, we can find, among other things, a hidden and non-invasive criticism of the understanding of death in Western thought. The work carries elements of dream fiction, while placing more emphasis on the overall visual atmosphere than on the logical sequence of the narrative. It was created in collaboration with Andrej Žabkay (sound part) and Vladimíra Vrbiňáková (editing). The projection itself is complemented by a design seat, a work called Physaria Armchair (2023), whose shape is inspired by the growth of a living organism. Its author is Barbora Hagarová and Data[LAB] (FAD STU).

Katarína Bajkayová (*1994)

is a graduate of master's studies at the Faculty of Arts of the Technical University in Košice, where she is currently a doctoral student. She is mainly devoted to the creation of spatial installations, while using ceramics in combination with other materials. Currently, she is particularly interested in the topics of social relations, housing and eroticism, which he investigates in the contexts of natural sciences, mythology, architecture and literature. The source of inspiration for the current presentation in the Šopa gallery is the life of mushrooms, focusing on their ability to care for each other and reproduce. She questions how something like this can be accessible to us. She focuses on aphrodisiac mushrooms. The new series will thus consist of ceramic objects whose shape is based on existing mushrooms with aphrodisiac effects. She contextualizes his thoughts with the ideas of Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour and Alan Badia.

Klaudia Kosziba (*1971)

complements the selection of exhibitors with a highly painterly approach, while, like Bajkayová, she devotes her attention to mushrooms. For a long time, Kosziba's artistic program was focused on purely painting questions, problems of the method of representation or its historical transformations. In her last paintings, her direct experience with mushrooms becomes her starting point, she observes the metamorphosis of their aesthetic qualities, their growth or disappearance. Similar to the case of Malinowská, ancient Greek culture formed an important background for painting decisions (let's think, for example, of Ovid's Metamorphoses). This starting point is already present in the very name of the entire Hymenophore series, which refers to the mythological figure of Hymen, the god of marriage. The second meaning is linked to the anatomy of mushrooms, it refers to the fibrous structures of their bodies from which spores fall out. In layman's terms, it is actually the reproductive organ of fungi. It is no coincidence that in the space of the exhibition they are in the presence of the works of Katarína Bajkayová and her shape interpretation of aphrodisiac mushrooms, in order to finally bring their full symbolic potential to life together. Klaudia Kosziba is a painter and teacher at AFAD in Bratislava. Since 2008, he has been leading Studio of Painting.

 

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