Artists: Lenka Adamcová, Luki Essender, Dominik Styk, Veronika Žilinská

There is something I remember about this place. It used to exist, I remember standing right there.

Did you hear the sound of a fork dropping late at night as you tried to sneak in? Too loud?

Located in the in-between space. Time unspecified, most likely very recent. In a moment of worlds that are on the verge of collapse or perhaps have already collapsed - and since their breakdown, the participating artists think of worlds that could replace them. But for the new they still carry the old - the artifacts of the past. Artifacts of experiences reshape pre-existing scenes in a new speculative universe and are carried in a reimagined form - displaying their temporal, fluid, digital, material or sonic form.

Do you move fast or slow? What do you see when you turn around?

The works of Lenka Adamcová, Luki Essender, Dominik Styk and Veronika Žilinská rise from personal experiences, memories or real-life situations. They draw on the essence of their immediate lived reality, which is significantly shaped by their queer identity and experience. Thus, their work stems from the most urgent need to find a safe space, to exist within the current established mechanisms that change only very slowly.

This room exists.

Are you staying?

The found, mixed and ready-made material elements, artifacts with new meaning in Luki Essender's works, connect the body movement with a memory. Reflecting on their queer experience, they deconstruct the domestic and public space, allowing new narratives to emerge and offering us to take control of the space - find our way of moving within the artist's cues.

‘Fragment 0’ depicts Veronika Žilinská's long term interest in the old House, once a romantic place where time was irrelevant and ‘everything seemed to be possible’. The time preserved in this capsule is also conserved in the strikingly detailed drawing. In ‘Aura’, a space both condensed and scattered, we take on the character of a thief, a visitor or a guard and move through a nostalgia of a place where ‘the irreplaceable stolen artifacts once rested’.

Dominik Styk's works bring both physical and illusive aspects to the exhibition - oscillating between fantasy and reality. Although his objects are not of this world, of our "knowing", we somehow feel close to them. Used materials from the past world rebuild his objects in the new one - the one, ‘where trembling border with delusion is shared’.

Lenka Adamcová's compositions reflect the experience of fear, the emotional experience of resistance, feelings of motion and movement. Her installation, activated every 15 minutes, takes us into a scattered reality and leaks from the outside world to the inside - offering visitors to encounter the remindings of the outside either from the gallery yard or within the room.

The communication of the works of the exhibiting artists transforms the gallery space into a transition between the external and the internal, taking us on a personal journey of what may, or may not, emerge after this collapse.

What was it that you saw leaking through the floor?

text by Paula Ďurinová

Curator: Paula Ďurinová
Curatorial assistance: Natália Sýkorová

Supported using public funds from Slovak Art Council.

Graphic design: Markéta Skalková

Exhibition views by David Stichling