The exhibition "I Was Keeping It All Safe for You" in the Bratislava branch
of Zahorian Van Espen gallery
is my attempt at a site-specific installation
or maybe even an environment.
There are three parts that refer to the underlying idea, which is time.
I have also invited Radovan Čerevka as a guest artist
who contributed with one, object-based artwork.
My own works are interventions into the architecture of the gallery.
On the ceiling of the gallery, there are stalactites
I have collected from under the Harbour Bridge in Bratislava.
What fascinates me about them is that they bear natural shapes
although their creation was initiated by the human.
They have been formed by sediments seeping through
the concrete and thus resemble stalactites one knows from a cave.
While in a cave, it takes tens of thousands of years for them to form,
these stalactites gain some 30-50 cm over 30-40 years.
So it’s a work dealing with time, our perception of time
and the inconceivability of the geological time.
So it is subjective time opposed to the geological, even archaeological one.
This piece is the largest intervention in the gallery space.
I painted the whole ceiling with skin tone silicone
and it is to suggest this weird, dead skin that peels off.
What fascinates me about it is, again, the ceiling and the architecture,
specifically the traces of formwork left in concrete one usually associates
with the Brutalist architecture.
And as if by peeling off the form of the ceiling I am putting back,
on the inverse side, the wood’s texture.
The third thing presented here are these honeycombs.
What I like about it is that their architecture is created by human
but the bees create their own sort of urbanism or a city.
These honeycombs are abandoned since they are infested by a parasite
that slowly decomposes them for the whole duration of the exhibition.
This small parasite, called Greater wax moth, eats away at them slowly.
Of course, this is to be understood metaphorically –
were it to stay here for a year or two the honeycombs would disappear.
So, once again, it’s the nature of time that is being expressed here,
the time of nature this time.
So it is the human factor referred to in the stalactites,
then this sort of post-human time,
this weird skin, and this third factor,
the time of natural decomposition, destruction,
a kind of a question mark hanging above us.