UNTITLED

UNTITLED


curator Nina Vrbanová

photo Petra Kelement Ačová

Synagóga - Centrum súčasného umenia, Trnava

2023

The spatial installation, created by the artist, especially for the exhibition space of the former Jewish synagogue, is dominated by an opulent, almost baroque nude of the artist, "hovering" above the heads of the viewers in the middle of the central nave of the synagogue. The photograph is based on the well-known image of Ophelia as a tragic figure in the history of art and culture, whom the author associates with the melancholy of the Roma ethnicity, and particularly her own identity as a Roma woman, in close relation to the architecture and symbolism of the place. The work works with monumentality and baroqueness of expression, accentuating the female Roma body and the associated cultural code.


The levitating photography frames and architecturally connects the exhibition as a whole. It can also be understood literally as a historical or cultural image of the Roma, which hangs in the air and is permanently present beyond individual stages and nuances. An inconspicuous fragment of living nature (a liana) connects the artist's image as Ophelia, both meaningfully and physically with the object of the black bathtub in which she is subtly mirrored. The "blackness" of the bathtub, which is an allusion to the Jewish ritual mikveh bath, permeates along with the smell of tar into the beauty and color of the gypsy shawl. Gradually, it also turns black, as if it were impossible to extricate and purify oneself from one's fate.


from the curatorial text by Nina Vrbanová