The Oskár Čepan awards are foremost an institution with a tradition.
They evolve with time. That means it develops with regards to our local art scene and ideas on the international art scene.
We can't say that the Oskár Čepan awards didn't go through various transformations.
I think it was a good idea to change the statute because of timing issues this year but also change in the sense that
the artists can present their older works with the new ones or even current projects.
The most important was to meet everybody at the spot of the final exhibition.
After that, we did interviews directly in ateliers.
We wanted to get to know their work in the context of the places where it's created.
From these interviews, we found out what was their idea of their best performance.
It was a matter of the dialogue between the artists and the curators,
and I think it is essential that the artists have the conditions and the means to present what they believe is the most important.
For example, Adam Novota works with sociological projects and themes. He is working on a project about Milan Rastislav Štefánik and presents it.
It's an interactive, participatory project with people from Košariská, where he includes VR, homeless people; it's very deliberate.
He is an artist who thinks universally about the sustainability of utopic systems. I think this way of thinking should be closer to us now more than ever.
The others also react to current situation, culture, and society they live in.
I have to mention Emília Rigová, known as Bári Raklóri, which is her Roma pseudonym.
She is a Slovak artist with Roma roots who works with female identity, gender content, and Roma identity.
She does this in a radical way. She uses the method of performances while experimenting with physical limits.
For example her video called Vomite ergo sum, where she vomits gold.
It's all authentic, so she had to take a risk; she had to do exercises to be able to film this short video. There's a lot of layers in this video.
Works of Lucia Mičíková are ephemeral. Even though they have solid form, she works a lot with paintings, drawings but she likes to use layers,
pastiche, objects, mix all available media, create new installations that present landscapes of her mind that blur the perception of what is up and down.
They make a spatial world with new connections.
Her sensitiveness and poetics are enriching because it's not just visually attractive, but her works are especially profound,
they contain many references to philosophy, literature, and poetry.
There are more in-depth references to micro/macro cosmological theories hidden inside.
We say that Boris Sirka has a chameleon-like character.
He has changed his signature style. He is somewhere between painting, drawing, film making, and contemporary music.
A today's man who knows subcultures works with references to them but works from a perspective. His works can be enjoyed from various views.
Boris decided to show both video, film and a new series of paintings inspired by science theories and methods of visualizing these theories.
We called the exhibition Time after time, after we talked about the character of these works. We couldn't avoid political contexts after speaking with the artists.
Society had the opportunity to move forwards this year, and we have also seen the limits of our public matters and how we can work with them.
We realized that contemporary art can express content that we cannot communicate with other media nor fields.
At the same time, we are at the heart of Bratislava's Old Town district, on the 3rd floor of a former Dunaj shopping center, with windows facing the SNP square,
where the most important political events of the past 30 years took place. This has brought many questions to us.
I don't think they are explicitly shown in all artworks; they don't include the same topic.
Time after time, a new beginning, new faith in a better world belongs to young people, contemporary art, and I hope it belongs to our future as well.