Gabriel Lešinský: New interfaces 02 / Deep Tales

We cordially invite you to a lecture by speleologist Gabriel Lešinský, which will be partially connected with a guided tour of Katarína Poliačikova's exhibition Trembling Edges and which, in addition to the artist, will also be attended by the curator of the exhibition, Zuzana Jakalová!

MEDIUM Gallery, Hviezdoslavovo námestie 18, Bratislava


The lecture will be held in Slovak language.

 


Gabriel Lešinský's lecture under the title Deep Tales will be devoted to the topic of "deep time", which - as a professional caver - he has been discovering and exploring throughout his life in the region of south-eastern Slovakia.

Gabriel Lešinský is primarily devoted to research in the fascinating area of the Slovak Karst on Gemer. It is a country that he himself describes as "Emmenthal", or a place where two worlds meet - the one we see above the surface of the earth, and the other, immensely large and so far unexplored, which is hidden down there. The aforementioned "Emmetal" of the Slovak Karst consists of tens of thousands of caves, of which only 1,350 have been discovered so far.

The stories of the caves and the objects found in them go far beyond the human scale. Caves are empty-filled spaces, a kind of time-lapse holes, which thoroughly record not only the geomorphological development, but also the presence of man in the landscape across millennia. Despite the fact that the underground landscape is a world formed over millions of years without life and light, for Gabriel Lešinský caves are surprisingly accurate analogies of human life.

 

 


Originally from Košice, Gabriel Lešinský has been working as a volunteer caver since 1989, and since 1997 as an organized caver in the Slovak Speleological Society. Since 1996, he has been engaged in research professionally as an employee of the Slovak Museum of Nature Conservation and Caving in Liptovský Mikuláš. During his work so far, he has discovered and co-discovered around 50 caves, a few of which have the status of national significance.

 


The interdisciplinary lecture series New Interfaces 02 in the dramaturgy of the head of the MEDIUM Gallery, Miroslava Urbanová, focuses on topics affecting our conditions of cognition in the interfaces of constantly updating technologies and in contrast to the desire for an authentic, visceral experience of the escaping here and now. It focuses primarily on the investigation and reflection of different types of spaces, their meanings, transformations, cohabitation within spaces: public space, digital spaces, topoi, spaces that remain seemingly untouched by people, or are totally and irreversibly transformed. The aim of the lectures is to provide a comprehensible approach to aspects of our lived online present in circles that reflect the posthumanist discourse, transformations in the perception of time and temporality, new artistic interfaces such as game art. At the same time, the lectures reflect the themes that appear in the dramaturgy of the exhibition plan of the gallery (and the reading club for VŠVU students What's the Point?), which carries a certain line of tension between the subject reacting to the new interfaces of technological progress, its effects on our perception of living and virtual reality and escape to the corporeality of experience.

 


Supported using public funding by Slovak Arts Council.

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