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rip the tea: from gossip to debate / HELD

Discussion at tranzit.sk

✧ When? 03. 07. 2026, 18:00

✧ Where? tranzitsk, Beskydská 12, Bratislava

✧ Moderated by Michaela Kacsiová

✧ Discussants: Ivana Rumanová, Eva Priečková, Marína Abramovič Po Sebe Neupratuje /Kasha Potrohosh, Gabriela Halás, Martin Toldy/

How does the artistic environment look if we understand it as a network of informal conversations, relationships, and whispers instead of a set of individual authorships?

The discussion entitled “Od klebety k debate / From Gossip to Debate” follows a series of events by the HELD collective. This time, attention is turned to teams and the way in which they arise, function, and create alternative forms of cooperation in contemporary art. The starting point of the discussion is the topic of gossip, which we do not perceive only as a tool of control, exclusion or the creation of power relations. We are also interested in its ability to connect people and create communities, networks of support, sharing, and collective care. Gossip can also be the driving force of resistance and a form of opposition to power structures and oppression.

The discussion will create space for the invited participants to share experiences which often remain outside the official narratives of artistic practice. We are interested in the everyday functioning in the artistic environment – the joys, conflicts, invisible work, and the ways in which we create conditions for each other’s existence and creation. In a time of the increasing precarization and individualization of cultural work, we consider issues of solidarity, mutual support, and collective organization to be an important part of the discussion about contemporary art.

✧ Members of the collective: Daniela Drobná, Jaroslava Labudová, Veronika Majerčíková, Michaela Kacsiová, Mária Kižnanská, Hana Ontkocová, Fanny Elisabeth Pekarčíková, Sarah Camilla Pekarčíková, Elena Špirengová, Lenka Štefanková

✧ What happens when a group of women create a group chat on Instagram?
HELD is an art-theoretical collective formed out of friendship, shared experience and the need to articulate our own position. We grew up on the peripheries of Slovakia marked by economic deprivation, in the reality of gender inequalities and constant questioning of identity. We share care as a process, strategy and practice. We connect the personal with the political, women's experience with collective resistance. We create without pressure, without burnout, without obedience.

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This event is organized as a part of the Study Room - Platform for Mutual Learning a project initiated by Judit Angel, Viktoria Gajdošová, and Vivien Kvasnicová.

It is a project of the tranzit.org network.
tranzit.sk is a member of the network.

ERSTE Foundation is main partner of tranzit.

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

✧ Marína Abramovič po sebe neupratuje is an open collaborative collective of young artists, primarily students and recent graduates of the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava (AFAD), active since 2015. The group's projects exist at the intersection of performance art and theatre, often accompanied by a distinctive sound and musical component. "MAPSN creates carefully conceived performative situations, staged according to a predetermined script. Usually devoid of narrative and marked by a particular approach to absurdity and the bizarre, their works employ the expressive potential of gestures, words, bodies, situations, sites, and materials, as well as the emotional force of metaphor, to allude to serious and unsettling subjects. These include existential anxiety in the era of climate catastrophe, interspecies solidarity, and the latent mechanisms of power, aggression, dominance, and submission embedded in everyday social relations." (Mazalanová, E., "Tri možné modely kolektivity" Flash Art Czech & Slovak Edition, Vol. 14, No. 52, p. 46.)

✧ Martin Toldy is an artist, performer, researcher, and organizer working in the context of Slovak art since 2013.
Combining intermedia project or installations with live performance he focuses on how we confront ourselves with play, chance, experimentation, and collaboration. In this way he inquires into current cultures of care, economies of intimacy, politics of sharing; in other words, into our ability to be and feel together. Usually he incorporates elements of humour, simplicity and absurdity as well as conceptual and research-based approaches. Martin Toldy graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in the Intermedia department in 2019 with a diploma thesis on the topic of "Fields and Roles on Our Scene".
He is the founder and an active member of the performative group Marína Abramovič Po Sebe Neupratuje.


✧ Kasha Potrohosh
, a Ukrainian artist currently based in Bratislava and Ostrava. Graduating from the Intermedia Department at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava, she navigates the realms of intermedia projects with an attention on social critique. Alongside her solo projects, she plays an active role in the MAPSN performance collective.

✧ Gabriela Halás
is a graduate of painting at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava. She has been involved in performance art as a member of the collective Marína Abramovič Po Sebe Neupratuje. In 2024 and 2025, she curated the exhibition programme MAUZÓLEUM X.Y. for the FUGA cultural space in Bratislava. Her interests include anthropological questions, states of mind, women’s rights, philosophical inquiry, scientific knowledge, myths, mysticism and mysteries, archetypes, shifts in the perception of reality, absurdity, balance, paradox, kitsch, banality, humor, nature, activism, and the therapeutic effects of art. A well-considered concept, professional formal execution, and the pursuit of experience and eliciting response in art are equally essential to her practice. Gabriela Halás is a visual artist working at the intersection of artistic media and forms. She works with painting extended into spatial contexts, experiments with visual techniques, and blurs the boundaries between life and artistic creation.

✧ Ivana Rumanová is a cultural critic, cultural worker, and anthropologist. She studied cultural anthropology at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University in Prague and the Cultural Projects in Public Space program at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. She has never left this interface between social sciences and art, while feeling deep enthusiasm and sincere skepticism towards both fields. She has served as curator at the New Synagogue Žilina, and on the editorial boards of the magazines Kapitál and 3/4. She is a member of the Otvorená kultúra! (Open Culture!) platform, chair of Kultúrne odbory (the Cultural Unions) and a member of the Kultúrny štrajk (Cultural Strike) committee. In 2023, she received the Věra Jirousová Award for her contributions to the field of art criticism.

✧ Eva Priečková is an interdependent dance artist, researcher, and curator working primarily around the residency centre Telocvičňa in Bratislava. Under the name Eva Priečková / False Move, she facilitates SOFT CORE, an educational platform that combines embodied movement practice with critical reflection on the body and relationships. Her interests include dance in diverse communities (such as older adults, Roma communities, and social work contexts), ecosomatics and more-than-human relations, as well as rituals of grief and celebration. She is co-curator of the international symposium Contaminations.Through her artistic and research practice, she explores the transformative potential of dance education as a means of fostering social justice, mutual responsibility, and emancipation from the unconscious repetition of normative behaviours. For her, dance is an act of resisting the domestication of bodies and minds, a practice of curious attention to the world around us, imagination, awe, careful listening, and everything that cannot be expressed in words. In 2026, she completed her PhD at the Janáček Academy of Performing Arts (JAMU) in Brno. She values collaboration as a core artistic practice and has worked extensively with Yuri Korec & Co., Zuzana Žabkovová, Katarína Poliačiková, Sonja Pregrad, and many other inspiring artists.

Ilustration: Lenka Štefanková
Visual Identity: Vivien Kvasnicová



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tranzit sk // STUDY ROOM // OPEN CALL

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