Exhibition plan
2025&2024
* Exhibition plan 2025 * Exhibition plan 2024 *
Exhibition plan of Medium gallery for 2025:
mid-January - February
Entire gallery_L
Doe vs. Siren: On Metabolization and Shapeshifting
Artists: Alex Quicho, Bogna Konior, Nikola Balberčáková, Jakub Pohlodek, Junn
Zhou, Camille Wiesel
Curator of the exhibition: Doris Sisková, Václav Janoščík
Doves, bunnies, lambs and Bambis. It seems that the online space has been invaded by the cute. It is no longer just the images and cute cat memes. Our own identities and behaviour embody this interlocking of pure and commercial, innocent and exploitative, or the cute and the gore. In the exhibition we present several artists working with this particular logic of online environments.
March - mid-April
Entire gallery_L
PARALLEL WORLDS - 5th Anniversary of the Experimental Design Studio
Exhibitor(s): students, graduates and alumni of the Experimental Design Studio
Curator: Damir Daniel Demovič
The Experimental Design Studio at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava has completed its first five years. The exhibition project "Parallel Worlds" is not meant to be a retrospective, but rather an invitation to explore diverse approaches to design as a discipline, using the full breadth of media interfaces. At the same time, it will present in a concentrated form the specific focus of the studio, which views design as a complex system deeply interconnected with everyday life, hence the high level of responsibility and motivation to critically explore its operational space.
mid-April – May
Front part of the gallery_M
All the stories I have ever told you were fiction
Kuba Stępień
Curator: Romuald Demidenko
The video installation All the stories I have ever told you were fiction by Kuba Stępień takes viewers into a dreamlike world of gestures and non-verbal narration produced by performers united in semi-impromptu movement. The six interweaving scenes making up the video performance create a hypnotic collage of fiction, imagination and desire, constructed from images of bodies, collective movement and intimacy, challenging the standards of normative communication and binary orders.
mid-April – May
Back room of the gallery_S
Working title
Jana Kapelová
Curator: Eliška Mazalanová
Jana Kapelová's exhibition project for Medium Gallery presents 3 videos of the artist from the last 2 years, in which she deals with the now ubiquitous search for happiness, or trying to achieve balance and live a happy life. This is often unthinkable without self-analysis and processing different areas of life. The author experiments in her latest projects with a slightly different authorial approach. This reflects a desire to do something spontaneous, manual, material and physical, to break out of her familiar patterns. The actors and actresses in the videos are ceramic or glass vessels, which can be seen as metaphors for the desire of personal fulfilment, or the artist's hands, which "play" assigned roles.
June - mid-July
Entire gallery_L
Working title
Simona Gottierová
resident of the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Cité
July - mid-August
Entire gallery_L
Begone Estrone (There's something in the water and it tastes bittersweet…)
Artists: Natália Sýkorová, Paula Gogola
Curator: Zuzana Jakalová
‘Begone Estrone’ is a collaborative exhibition that brings together practices of two artists Paula Gogola and Natália Sýkorová, whose work intersects at the convergence of personal identity, technological landscapes of female and trans bodies, both of which they explore through the perspective of female health and care. The exhibition explores the bathroom as a simulacrum—a distorted reflection—of a safe, indoor space and coalesces their critical practices into a meticulously constructed environment that interrogates the bathroom as both a site of sanctuary and a simulacrum of oppressive forces. By amplifying a version of an everyday bathroom, the installation invites viewers to step into a hyperreal scenery that destabilizes the assumed neutrality of domestic spaces.
September - mid-October
Front of gallery_M
Carnivores
Artists: Zsófia Antalka, Eszter Metzing, Andrea Szilák
In the course of our project, we are examining the archetype of the hunter, the associations of being a carnivore, and the issues of inclusion and intolerance. The visceral and philosophical state of being a predator, is permeated by the moral dilemma of aggression, and the urge of sustaining needs of mortality, also alliterating with socio-economic systems and behaviour patterns as well. Our collaboration include, mostly installations and spatial works including a range of diverse materials, made coherent by our common denominator in organic thinking and construction.
September - mid-October
Back room of the gallery_S
Failed Consciousness
Denisa Štefanigová
Curator: Martina Mrázová, Jan Kristek - exhibition architect
The project maps the landscape of the unconscious, which is full of inner assumptions and demons as well as full of of intimate wonder and imagination, which Denisa allows to come to the surface in the process of painting. Our hidden inner landscapes are inhabited by animals, humans and hybrid beings who are intertwined and are changing themselves over time. The exhibition is conceived as one central object, an assemblage moving on the edge of small architecture, graphics and paintings, representing the landscape of the unconscious. On the walls, then, are canvases depicting bright moments that emerge from the unconscious at unexpected moments.
October - mid-November
Front of gallery_M
Working Title
Artists: Abel Rad, Ana Avram, Nana Biakova, Paul Ilfoveanu, Mantas Valentukonis
Curators: SLPOVR
The exhibition examines water's paradoxical roles in a human-centric world through Donna Haraway's concept of natureculture, which merges nature and culture into an intertwined, co-evolving relationship. Water, symbolizing both life and destruction, serves as a key theme, illustrating natureculture's interconnected dynamics. Water’s capacity to define territories and borders underscores its role in shaping human and ecological landscapes.
October - mid-November
Back room of the gallery_S
Working Title
Ľudmila Machová
resident of the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Cité
from 28.11. - December/January
Trnava Poster Triennial
Exhibition plan of Medium gallery for 2024:
Exploitation in the Peratic Hinterland
- Group exhibition
- Curators: Juraj Rattaj, Róbert Repka
- February 2024
Art that speaks for the animals (not in a literal sense) tries to show what a prison this world is for them, but also how precarious our future is in a time of environmental crisis. The zoo has been chosen by the curators as a setting for the application of environmental thinking, which is often aestheticized nowadays, thus leveling the issue. Their concern is not to traumatise animals in the zoo environment, but to try to traumatise us humans.
The subject of zoos resonates with a number of national and international authors.
Solo exhibition
- Juraj Ďuriš
- April 2024
The exhibition of Juraj Ďuriš is a partial outcome of his residency supported by the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Cité, Paris. The author used the city of Paris as a pictorial environment in which elements of global trade and industry are embedded. Although they are far from our sight, the functioning of the world we live in is absolutely dependent on them, even if we don't want to admit it.
Author's use of painting draws the viewer's attention to an image in which thought content is unobtrusively smuggled in. This awakens reflection on the way we live our lives. The allure of this method lies in the fact that it does not express opinions and words such as ecology, which can evoke a negative attitude towards the subject and the work as a whole.
Ďuriš's aim is to reach as large an audience as possible, not to create more exclusive products for the market, and he often realises his works in public spaces. It is the quality of the workmanship that allows him to embrace a complex theme and establish a dialogue with the inhabitants of the cities where it is realised.
FACTORIES
- Maud Kotasová
- Curator: Martina Ivičič
- April 2024
The series FACTORIES is dedicated to factories and the people who worked, lived and died in them. Not all factories were just about work. They have become a symbol of impermanence and extinction and the struggle for life. Every locker is a human story, a derivative of one man's existence, his personal time capsule. Maud Kotas's work is more or less covertly narrative.
The visual language accentuates an aesthetic that is almost graphically schematic in conjunction with an aesthetic of wear and tear. Communication and authenticity are always superior to aesthetics.
Radical Protection – Case Studies
- Curator: Igor Machata
- April 2024
Radical Protection – Case Studies is a series of two or three events. The main point of the event is a lecture and discussion. Each of the lectures will present one domestic or international architectural studio and one project that the curator interprets as so-called radical conservation. The lecture is accompanied by an exhibition of photographic and/or textual documentation of the project.
4 whales in a soft sponge
- Collective exhibition
- Curator: Nika Kupyrova
- June 2024
The conceptual recipes of the avant-garde were a critique of the habits of the bourgeoisie, of mindless consumption and the cultural system based on an economy of exploitation. They attempt to reproduce the dysfunctional, the disorderly and the meaningless, the absurdity of the world. The exhibition re-inteprets the cookbooks of the avant-garde, setting them in dialogue with contemporary artistic positions. Noticing the interest of the Viennese art scene, it brings together seven artistic positions which work on the border between food and visual art.
Basic Materials
- Adam Turzo
- Curator: Tomáš Moravanský
- June 2024
The project is a fusion of organic and inanimate, durable and non-durable materials, created mainly by processing glass waste, technical material and baked goods, which is the main building block of the exhibition's architecture itself. The critical starting point is the idea of an individual who undergoes a transgression, manifested by the accumulation of
material residues and their transformation into artefacts of an imaginary collectible character, fetishes or souvenirs representing the basic conditions of life.
Fictive Bloodlines
- Artists: Alexandra Barth, Ivana Mojšová, Uľjana Zmetáková
- Curator: Matúš Novosad
- August/September 2024
With Fictive Bloodlines, the exhibition aims to show the visual affinities of the emerging without being directly influenced by the gaze or intimate knowledge of the other's work.
It should bring to mind the wonder of how two similar things can come into being in one place without touching, until a certain gravitational moment that is the exhibition here. It allows us to think back in the artists' individual lines about which principles of the paintings created the proximity.
Exploring Randomness
- Kristina Rypáková
- Curator: Monika Mitašová
- August/September 2024
The exhibition Exploring Randomness presents the artist's outputs created during her Fulbright Visiting Scholar Program at the Harvard Graduate School of Design - Harvard University in Boston, USA (2023). The research project responds to the author's fascination with randomness and stochastic phenomena, which she explores as creative phenomena in the process of architectural design. The phenomena studied and the digital artefacts created were tested through Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques.
Contemporary jewelry as a communication tool
- Šperk stret
- Artists: students from jewelry studios in Bratislava, Pilsen, Jablonec n.N. and Budapest
- curatorial team: K. Španihelová, M. Verner, L. Šikolová, F. Vági
- October 2024
The field of contemporary jewelry is a self-reflexive practice, which means that it focuses on the reflection of the conditions in which it takes place. Contemporary authors generally work in a conscious relationship, often critical, to the history of practice in the wider field of jewelry. This distinguishes contemporary jewelry from other forms of body adornment, and the practices of its makers focus primarily on the relationship to the body and wearability in the context of the communicative qualities of jewelry.
Contemporary jewelry has the power to draw the viewer in and engage them in a dialogue between the object and its wearer and the audience through its intimate placement on the body. As a rule, they are not perceived as decorative objects, they have the ability to be a non-verbal vehicle for critical social commentary, they are a thought-provoking tool, they have the ability to preserve and convey memory or emotion.
The project will present the work of four jewelry studios in a Central European context, the work of contemporary students and the results of their creative education aimed at developing the ability of critical thinking and artistic expression in the given medium: the s+m+l_xl Metal and Jewelry Studio at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava (pedagogue K. Španihelová), the Metal and Jewelry studio at the Institute of Art and Design at the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen (ped. M. Verner), the Glass and Jewelry studio in Jablonec nad Nisou - Department of Design at the Technical University of Liberec (ped. L. Šikolová) and the Jewelry and Metal Design MA, Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest (ped. F. Vági).
In October 2024, the exhibition will be one of the side events of the thematically related 12th International Conference of Contemporary Jewelry 2024, the creation of which is closely linked to the past and present activities of the s+m+l_xl Metal and Jewelry Studio at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava.
Nothing But a Curtain
- Zula Rabikowska
- Curator: Andrea Vrtelová
- November 2024
The project Nothing But a Curtain explores gender identity and the meaning of contemporary womanhood and femininity in the former Eastern Bloc countries, including Slovakia. Zula Rabikowska photographed and interviewed 104 people (focused on women, non-binary, genderfluid, and transgender people) about their personal experiences of gender and womanhood. The project aimed to challenge the way women and non-binary persons from Central and Eastern Europe are presented and to contribute to the debate on boundaries and gender identity in the 21st century.
PHO BO Award
- Pop-up exhibition associated with the announcement of the winners of the international photography book competition
- Curatorial team: Lenka L. Lukačovičová, Juraj Blaško
- November 2024
Presentation of the international photography competition PHO BO Award, which will gather student photography books from the V4 countries. In the Medium Gallery there will be an award ceremony and a short presentation and pop-up exhibition of the best selected photography books. Three categories of photography books will be selected by an expert jury.
The line - a line
- Gréta Mária Srnová
- November 2024
The exhibition is conceived as a free research of drawing as a record of what is seen, or as a plein air drawing, and then its overlaps into various artistic or personal positions: drawing, painting, photography, text. The exhibition will present not only the resulting whole, but also the process through an open studio format. The presentation will be a mapping of a three-month residency facilitated by the Academy of Fine Arts and Desing in Cité, Paris. It is an unfinished process that will hint at the artist's thought tendencies in her work with a certain expectation of maturation.