Solid is Only a Word

Curated by Judit Angel

Tranzit.sk, Bratislava

21.09 – 03.11.2023

Exhibition leaflet texts: Judit Angel, Ata Karakci

Graphic design: David Kalata

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.

Judit Angel, curator, Tranzit.sk

Credits for the audio installation Something was about to happen and then:

Duration: 22 min. 

Cast: Maja Hriešik, Zuzana Husárová

Recorded by: Jonáš Gruska, LOM space
Voice editing: Lukáš Kubičina

Music: Sarah Hudges: I love This City and Its Outlying Lands

Music released by: mappa, 2020

Textile collaboration: People on Earth

ERSTE Foundation is main partner of tranzit.
Project was supported using public funding by the Slovak Arts Council in the form of scholarship.

Projekt bol podporený formou štipendia Fondom na podporu umenia.