Reframing the Archive: Intimacy, Power, and Memory
Panel discussion at tranzit sk
⬡ Panel discussion with Mira Keratová, Ilona Németh & Olja Triaška Stefanović
⬡ Moderated by Ana de Almeida
/ 04. 12. 2025 / 6 p.m. / tranzit sk / Beskydská 12, Bratislava /
This event is a part of The Resistant Archive exhibition and will be held in Slovak language.
An archive is never neutral — it wavers between memory and forgetting, intimacy and power. Within the framework of Ana de Almeida’s exhibition The Resistant Archive at tranzit.sk, a conversation brings together three compelling voices whose practices reveal the archive as a living, contested field. Artists Ilona Németh and Olja Triaška Stefanović, together with curator Mira Keratová, unfold how acts of remembering can become acts of resistance.
Tracing distinct genealogies and geographies, they share resonant yet divergent approaches. Mira Keratová draws on her curatorial research into the unofficial art and performative gestures of the 1970s and 1980s, where documentation oscillates between witness and absence. Ilona Németh interlaces personal and political layers through works that revisit family narratives and the shifting conditions of post-socialist Central Europe, treating material memory as a form of quiet defiance. Olja Triaška Stefanović turns to public and institutional archives, revealing how collective histories are mediated through photography, architecture, and the remnants of Cold War infrastructures.
Together, they navigate how archives—private or public, visible or concealed—shape our sense of belonging and dissent. Moderated by Ana de Almeida, the conversation expands the horizon of the exhibition, inviting us to consider the archive not as static evidence, but as a collective, performative, affective, and political space where the past insists on being reimagined.
Mira Keratová is an art historian and curator whose research delves into the intersections of art, activism, and documentation. Graduating from the Faculty of Philosophy at Comenius University and completing her PhD at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava, she currently works as a curator at the Bratislava City Gallery and the Central Slovakian Gallery in Banská Bystrica. Her research-based exhibitions often revisit unofficial art practices and performative gestures of the late socialist period. Through projects such as her extensive work on Ján Budaj and the Temporary Society of Intense Experience, she explores how ephemeral acts of art-making can persist as fragile, resistant forms of memory.
Ilona Németh is an artist and curator based in Slovakia whose practice engages with the legacy of socialism and the rapid transformations following 1989 in Central Europe. Drawing from local archives, personal narratives, and state relics, she reclaims overlooked histories and intervenes in collective memory by foregrounding regional perspectives often marginalized in Western-dominated art discourse. Her work explores the political and poetic dimensions of these histories, reclaiming the vernacular as a site of resistance and recontextualization, and emphasizing the urgency of recording histories from below.
Olja Triaška Stefanović is a visual artist, photographer born in Novi Sad, former Yugoslavia, based in Slovakia. Her artistic research and photographic practice investigate the intersections of political history, memory, public archives and visual culture, focusing on the Cold War, the Non-Aligned Movement and postwar diplomacy. Through archival research, fieldwork, and lens-based media, she examines how images, gestures, and material exchanges—from hunting diplomacy to floral protocol—reflect systems of power, ideology, and cultural diplomacy. Her recent exhibitions include Stories from Around the Non-Aligned (Berlin, 2025) and Aren’t They Cute (Vienna, 2025). She has been awarded a 2025 residency at Headlands Center for the Arts (San Francisco - June/July 2025) for a project with Cold War veterans at Nike Missile Site at San Francisco. Her artistic research she presented at numerous conferences and symposia, including at Documenta Institute in Kassel, where she spoke about hunting and diplomacy within the Non-Aligned Movement. Triaška Stefanović is Associate Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava and a 2022–2023 Fulbright Scholar at Parsons / The New School in New York.
Ana de Almeida, a Portuguese artist born in Czechoslovakia and based in Austria, will moderate the discussion. Her practice revolves around self-archiving, affect, and counter-memory, often tracing the emotional and political residues of Portugal’s post-1974 transition from dictatorship to democracy. By linking these Southern European experiences to broader continental narratives, including the Czechoslovak Velvet Revolution, she reveals how intimate acts of remembrance intersect with the larger architectures of history.
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ERSTE Foundation is main partner of tranzit.
This project has been supported by the Austrian Federal Ministry for Housing, Arts, Culture, Media and Sport (BMWKMS) and the Austrian Cultural Forum Bratislava.
Project has been supported by public funds provided by the Slovak Arts Council.
The Bratislava City Foundation supported the project under the original title Collective Archive.
Media partners: Artalk.info, Flash Art CZ & SK, Kapitál, GoOut.net
Photo: Between revolutions, Ana de Almeida 2024 (José Alberto, Lisbon 1980)
Related
Ana de Almeida: The Resistant Archive