slovensky/
tranzit.org/

tranzit.sk/

Dana Tomečková: Solid is only a Word

Exhibition project

Text Information/
Picture Gallery/

Curated by Judit Angel

Opening: 21 September 2023, 6 pm
21.09 – 03.11.2023

Venue: tranzit.sk, Beskydská 12, Bratislava
Open: Tuesday – Friday: 2:30 – 6:30 p.m.


During this summer Dana Tomečková has been inhabiting the premises of tranzit.sk and using it as an expanded studio, a space-time for developing a new outcome of her long-standing research on matter/materiality, its processes and agency as well as our relationship to it. The main theme of the exhibition is the constant transformation and slippery character of the reality we live in, which undermines the Anthropocentric view of the world and the degree of our control over situations, objects and actions.

This time Dana Tomečková’s persistent interest in powdery materials, in their formability, fragility and vulnerability has been converted into a landscape of objects. In this site-specific installation, where areas of matter and soft forms coexist, natural structures melt with bodily traces in a movement marked by ruptures, cracks and volumes in tension. A stable – unstable situation is created, an opportunity to meditate on what the events that we see as fixed things are, or how to stay with the unstable.

The material landscape is accompanied by an audio play about the encounter with matter and energy viewed as reversible forces, which have their own tendencies, will, and inner life. A short video shot in Sandberg, the paleontological site close to Bratislava, stays in the background as a reference to deep-time and the workings of nature taking place independently of us. Textual and visual notes placed in tranzit’s study-room, as well as the exhibition's publication, offer a glimpse into the artist’s mental landscape, and into her connections with science, in particular with cosmology, which understands the physical universe as a unified whole.

Moving between abstract space and specific location, theory and practice, concept and experience, Dana Tomečková’s new exhibition project creates a space for sensitivity, attention, curiosity, and slowness, and invites us to be aware of our connectedness with other forms of matter, as well as our own vulnerability and temporariness.

Dana Tomečková (* 1986, Bratislava) graduated from the S+M+L_XL Studio - Metal and Jewellery at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava. During her studies she completed a study stay at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts.

She works with objects and installations as well as with jewellery. In her work she repeatedly returns to the theme of temporality through the fragility and changeability of things. She is fascinated by the unstable nature of reality, its elusiveness. She responds to it with deliberation and persistence.

Her recent group exhibition projects include In Pieces (2023) and Disappearing Body, (2021) both at Slovak National Gallery - The Schaubmar Mill in Pezinok. Her latest solo exhibition at Medium Gallery, Note on the Temporary Matter II - What Everything Must Be in the Air That I Think Something and You Say It (2023), was loosely based on Note I. (Beastro Bratislava, 2020).

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ERSTE Foundation is main partner of tranzit.

Project was supported using public funding by the Slovak Arts Council in the form of scholarship.

Media partners:
Artalk.sk, Flash Art CZ & SK, Kapitál, GoOut.net

@ Dana Tomečková, 2023



Related
Limits of Stability
Staying with the Unstable

Downloads
Dana_Tomeckova_leaflet.pdf (pdf, 5.5 mb)