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The Others fair Contemporary Art Turin 2023 Italy Sopa gallery Kosice Slovakia - Giuseppe Alletto artist
Šopa Gallery is an independent chamber space focused on the presentation of contemporary visual art in Košice.
It presents young and middle generation artists of the Central European scene with a focus on current social issues and trends in fine arts.
The selection of individual authors is subject to an effort for an open-minded view of the contemporary art world and thus offer space for experimental, interdisciplinary or site-specific projects.
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(by Victoria Koziot)
Exactly thirty years ago, the people of Ursula le Guin’s imaginary land, Orsinia, located somewhere in Central Europe, took to the streets and began to protest with jingling keys. This was in Unlocking the Air (1990), the last of the Orsinian short stories, and, most probably, the people finally brought down the regime. We may not know precisely where that land lay, but we can assume that the action is set in a Slovakian town.
I visited Bratislava and Košice during the thirtieth anniversary celebrations of the start of the Velvet Revolution on 17th November 1989. I was there to explore contemporary Slovakian trends in political and social art. I set out in search of visual expressions of change on many levels; direct, symbolic, shifts of opinion or (self-)reflection, the process of consciously setting personal opinions within the abstract sphere of a network of different possible choices and so forth. There were plenty of people in the streets, yet the discussions that took place in the public domain were rather muted and tended towards leitmotifs of “We are great heroes” and “The truth will win”, a symbolic narrative[1] which plays the role of a new myth. Three decades later, is there no need for a new understanding of the process? Even an artist of the older generation, Rudolf Sikora, who was born in the nineteen forties, depicted himself carrying a cross on his shoulder. The cross bears the names of the heroes of the Velvet Revolution in his Verili sme… / We Believed… (19.11.1989, 6:00), created in 2019[2]. We assume that the experience might be perceived as a burden.
Rudolf Sikora, ‘Verili sme… Verili sme…’ / ‘We Believed… (19.11.1989, 6:00)’, 2019. The work was presented at the ‘Podoby Slobody’ / ‘Faces of Freedom’ exhibition curated by Omar Mirza at the Nitra Gallery; photo: Martin Sipták, courtesy of the Nitra Gallery
During my visit, I listened to a great many comments about how the visual arts scene had been lengthily bogged down in autonomous, self-centred, meta-narrative, post-conceptual art[3]. Prior to 2005 or thereabouts, signs of social and political engagement were discredited, being automatically associated with totalitarian propaganda. It would seem that this kind of conceptual neutrality endured for longer in Slovakia than it did in Poland. As an aside, might this have been because of the authoritarian policy maintained by Vladimir Mečiar[4]?
The shift from the post-conceptual to works that raise deliberate, engaged narratives can be seen in the transformation which has taken place in the poetics of Ilona Németh. In the nineteen nineties, she created post-minimal installations with either no reference to reality at all or with only the barest of associations. Those traces became more evident after 2005[5]. The disappointment felt in regard to the post-1989 period is interestingly shown in her Hmla / Fog (2013), a film which documents an artistic action she carried out on Bratislava’s Freedom Square (Námestie Slobody), an important space where people’s protests against the communist authorities took place in November 1989. During Németh’s action, artificial smoke drifted over the square, covering it. Fog is ambiguous when it comes to interpretation. The square is a space where different layers of memory clash. Although it is currently home to the Government Office of the Slovak Republic, it was rebuilt during the era of socialist realism, when it was named after a communist politician and became Gottwald Square. At the same time, the Fountain of Union (Fontána Družby) was erected as its centrepiece. So the square certainly played a role in socialist propaganda. New architectural plans for the square exclude the fountain, which is now severely damaged as a result of neglect, possibly deliberate. Fog could be understood as a representation of a short-lived collective memory, but it may also be interpreted as the state of ‘being in a fog’, of the sense of confusion felt in the new social and political situation.
The inferiority complex at work on the Slovakian art scene is palpable. Everyone is quick to mention its smallness and slowness to ‘catch up’.
