SympaSympo Bratislava 2025: Exhibition of Results

Stupava Synagogue

The SympaSympo format emerged in the Czech academic environment in 2021 as a generational, discipline-based, and community platform for working with clay. It began as a ceramics workshop prepared by students of the Ceramic Design Studio at the Faculty of Art and Design, J. E. Purkyně University in Ústí nad Labem, and in the Czech Republic it subsequently moved through ceramics and porcelain studios at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague and at the Ladislav Sutnar Faculty of Design and Art of the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen. Since their beginnings in the 1960s, ceramic symposia have spread mainly through personal connections: a participant of one became the founder/organizer of another. This model of development and care is also in SympaSympo’s DNA. Its definition likewise suggests an intention not to be bound by geographic, genre, or material borders, and a shift away from hierarchical frameworks toward seeing ceramics as a key argument for the acceptance of material-based practices in art.

SympaSympo, edition No. 4 expanded its scope to Slovakia for the first time. The symposium programme aspired to strengthen interdisciplinary experience, which was reflected in the cross-departmental composition of the team and ultimately in the symposium’s central theme – Challenge. The symposium took place in July 2025 at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design (VŠVU) on Drotárska cesta in Bratislava and, beyond Slovak–Czech participation, it reinforced Central European networking among students of art universities. An exceptional value was also the accompanying programme, featuring respected figures in ceramic and porcelain art and design not only from Slovakia (Simona Janišová, Karin Patúcová-Lunterová) but also from abroad (Ilona Romula from Latvia and Claire Ellis from Australia), who brought conceptually and materially diverse theoretical and practical perspectives from their artistic research.

Participants of the Bratislava symposium meeting could approach the theme “Challenge” freely—for example, by relating it in a universal way to the very nature of artistic creation; by working at familiar and unfamiliar intersections of art, craft, and design; or by recalling the inherently risky nature of the ceramic medium. Across ten authorial positions, we can observe thinking from multiple perspectives: a clear tendency to perceive clay as a competent language, to understand it as a symbolically charged medium with transhistorical memory, and an effort to communicate it through a critical message.

SympaSympo Bratislava 2025: 4 – 13 July 2025, VŠVU Bratislava

Exhibition of results: 12 – 14 December 2025, Stupava Synagogue

Concept, organisation: Katarína Tesař, Tereza Orviská, VŠVU Bratislava

Symposium participants: Jan Čihák (CZ), Barbora Hagara (CZ), Kristína Haviarová (SK), Rebeca Ihring (SK), Noemi Sidon (SK), Marija Tošić (SRB), Mária Trnková (SK), Eva Ungvári (SK), Tereza Orviská (SK), Katarína Tesař (SK)

Visual identity: Tomáš Luknár

Photos: Marek Benian, Lucia Mandicová

Curator: Viera Kleinová

Partners: Arts Support Fund, VŠVU, Bratislava, Stupava Synagogue, Makovice Stupave