Taking it from Above

Galéria Medium, Hviezdoslavovo nám. 18, Bratislava

Curators: Adrián Kobetič, Rebecca Opravil

Exhibition Architecture: Jakub Tóth

The Trnava Poster Triennial has long been monitoring how the medium of posters is changing over time and how the way we read them is changing. This year marked the twelfth edition of this international competition, which observes current visual and communication trends in global poster design and evaluates works in two categories – professional and student. The student category plays a key role in this process: it represents an environment where new visual approaches are created and where the boundaries between communication, authorial gesture, and visual experimentation are tested. This year's edition, continuing a long tradition of international confrontation, shows that young authors no longer perceive the poster as a static medium, but as a dynamic system responding to cultural pressure, political gestures, and the reshuffling of social values. The selection of fifty final posters therefore does not create a homogeneous whole, but rather a network of different approaches that together lead to a thoughtful, though not always harmonious, dialogue.

The title of the exhibition, Take it from Above, serves as a disposition—a subtle adjustment of perspective that allows us to see not only visual skill in the students' work, but above all their ability to think about the medium itself. The works on display cover the entire range of topics that shape visual communication today: from environmental and social issues to the analysis of visuality itself, its overload, acceleration, and fragmentation. Many posters express the need to slow down, to name the problem more precisely, or to create a space where the image can exist outside the system of immediate interpretation. Others deliberately work with irony, micro-gestures, or reduction. What they have in common is a precise, critical observation of the contemporary world and a willingness to seek new forms of visual argumentation.

The exhibition concept itself slightly shifts how we are used to approach the poster. Traditional verticality gives way to a different orientation – perhaps closer to body movement than to the gaze. Here, the poster behaves less like an image and more like an object that requires a new way of reading. The viewer is not forced to accept a single perspective; their position becomes part of the work. Stored layers, repeated formats, and seemingly simple gestures open up a field of interpretations: about the excess of images, the need for distance, the pressure of the visual environment, or, conversely, its fascinating diversity. The exhibition allows these meanings to flow freely and enables each visitor to reassemble them anew. The concept does not offer a definitive answer to what a poster should be today—rather, it creates a situation in which this question can be answered in multiple ways.

Partners: Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava, Slovak Centre of Design

This project is financially supported by Trnava Self-Governing Region.

Supported using public funding by Slovak Arts Council.