Ľudmila Hubová Machová – Overlooked Territory
The Overlooked Territory project of a painter and visual artist Ľudmila H. Machová follows on from her residency in Paris and earlier projects Synanthrope (2024) and Archivist of Hybrids (2023).
Medium Gallery
Through sensitive observation and examination of the urban environment, shaped by technological planning and typically man-made urban areas, the author studies specific forms of life – synanthropic plant species and weeds. She perceives them as actors capable of resisting adverse conditions and thus representing an alternative (often unwanted revival) to concrete fields or strictly formed and expensively maintained gardens. Through a spatial installation of paintings, objects, and photographs, the author records, modifies, and develops the narratives of these plants as a specific co-population of the city. In cracks, niches, and other (inter)spaces, situations and partnerships are born that, through their ability to resist and endure, remind us of the need to return to empathy and non-hierarchical interspecies cooperation, as well as the determination to confront normative frameworks and dictated power structures.
Ľudmila Hubová Machová (*1990) studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava, completed an internship at the University of Porto, Faculty of Fine Arts in Portugal, and a residency in Cité internationale des Arts in Paris (2024) under the auspices of VŠVU/AFAD. In 2017 and 2018, she was a finalist for the VÚB Foundation Award. She regularly participates in group exhibitions at home and abroad. Her solo projects include exhibitions at the Medium Gallery in Bratislava, the P.M. Bohúň Gallery in Liptov, the Municipal Gallery in Rimavská Sobota, the Nitra Gallery, and the Basement Studio in Olomouc. Her works, based on the medium of painting, naturally transform into multi-media installations. Through expanded forms of images, photographs, and sound recordings, she explores the boundaries of landscape areas and urban environments, as well as the relationships between organic plant bodies and synthetic materials. Ľudmila H. Machová's projects thus oscillate between the imagination of stimulating environments of hybrid forms of entities—objects, images, shapes, and meanings—while also opening up a discourse on the coexistence of plant species, overlooked spaces, and human (de)structured forms of perception.
Supported using public funds in the form of a scholarship from the Slovak Arts Council.
