Artist
Karina Golisová
Karina Golisová (*1997) works mainly with documentary photography. Her photographic interests are related to topics such as: living in a community, creating a "choosen family", defining oneself against conventional life and documenting young people. Her photographs often capture scenes and circumstances that usually remain hidden. He is active in the Slovak and Czech underground music scene, where he has been documenting events for years and also co-creating its visual identity.
She is the author of many self-published photographic zines such as "Utopia", "Published" and "Underground". Creating zines gives her the opportunity to reinterpret existing material and create a new full-fledged work with its own meaning. She has presented her work in Belgrade, Budapest, Tel Aviv, Zagreb and Paris. In 2020, she won first place at Slovak Press Photo and the Young Talent of the Year award for her documentary series about the community called Utopia. In 2023, she placed first in the Rovinj Photo Days festival with her series of photographs about the Bratislava community. She received her bachelor's degree from the Department of Photography and New Media at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava in the studio of Olja Triaška Stefanović and Jana Hojstričová. She spent a semester in Finland at the Department of Documentary Photography in Lahti. She is a recent graduate of the Master's degree at FAMU in Prague.
Like everyone else, I have to be somewhere too.
"The good for me is the place that is not any particular place. Like everyone else, I have to be somewhere. And if I have to be somewhere, no matter what, I prefer to be in a place that is a place in as small a measure as possible, a place that is non-specific in as large a measure as possible. This might lead one to believe that all the time I prefer to be in places I have not been before…”
- John Fosse, Essays.
This series is based on photographs I took during my first months after moving to Prague. Since my work so far has been primarily dedicated to documenting the one community I was part of, I wondered where my work would go after moving to another city. I am documenting my life, in a place I cannot name, which has a huge impact on me and covers me with many feelings.
Leaving my previous city leaves me to focus on the smaller cracks in each day. My experience is overexposed and intense. I may have been this way before but it is only now that I am entering a space where my being is not overwhelmed by people, familiars, circumstances or streets I know intimately.
The main theme of this series is a text by John Fosse: "A place that is no particular place" because it is the embodiment of the absurdity of a place that I am constantly thinking about and constantly trying to name. I encourage the viewer to interact and force them to find my thoughts, which even in real life become more enclosed and inaccessible to my surroundings. I try to deal with the new space through a more subjective level, where I draw attention more to myself and where it naturally happens that people leave my photographs and replace them with empty spaces. So this zine is about me, the person I live with, the food I eat, the places I don't know. Even though photography has always mainly provided me with a frozen memory that unfolds into a complete story, these photographs remind me of nothing, and at the same time remind me of a time when I'm just looking and observing.
In Oskar Helcel's Under Construction, the artist works to investigate a complex of commercial and office buildings in the centre of Prague designed by Zara Hadid. The complex is surrounded by a number of controversies concerning the investor's link to corruption, so Helce summons the figure of Hadid as a mysterious guide from the world of the dead, who, through a kind of biblical commentary, posits disturbing questions about power.
Space, time and the banality of everyday life are pervading motifs in Ines Karčáková's work. In Dancing Makes You As Happy As a 2073.35 Euro Pay Rise, the artist seeks to uncover the motivations associated with the previously idealistic vision of conquering the moon, which are now having a very concrete impact on consumer life on Earth, from scratch-resistant glass to GPS.
Karina Golisová provides insight into the structures of everyday life and relationships. Her project, Like everyone else, I have to be somewhere too, delves into the concept of anchoring oneself within the intricate fabric of community life. It explores the affirmation of existence and identity within the complex interplay of shared experiences.
Barbora Bačová gives a glimpse into her intimate life through her project I am gonna live my life, and conceives working with photography much more as a process than focusing on a specific or ‘successful’ result. Many of the images could conventionally be considered unsuccessful, which appeals to the artist, and she finds her signature in this approach.
The exploration of the culture surrounding the body and its definition of the ideal form is a central theme in Nadia Markiewicz's work. In her installation DRIVE-THRU, she combines objects, photography and video to address the fundamental question of what it means to fit or not fit in with the normative formula given by society.