Contemporary Slovak photography

Times when photographic images were perceived as authentic decals of reality, as a proof that captures something that really happened are still not buried.

Digital technology had us convinced very quickly that photography cannot be trusted anymore, that anything can be manipulated and presented as reality. Step by step, we’ve become distrustful and alert to photographic images, even though we may happen to fell for it when relaxing. The world of images and its creators are playing a game of real and fabricated and we often find ourselves tired and confused of it. It is liberating when we stop ostentatively demanding the proofs of autenticity and dividing on what is real and what is fabricated. It is enriching when we let the images that vibrate our desire for uncovering new angles of view to lead us. The images that we kindly let ourselves to believe in, that don’t provoke our sharp sense of reality and instinct of not letting us be manipulated. There are pictures, that can non-violently drop our senses off-balance the conventional vector of every-day’s perception of reality.

There are pictures, that make us stand and look at more than 4 seconds and we have an impulse to walk inside of them, to carry this experience outside the gallery and keep it for as long as we can.

In the project of the exhibition Shifting Spaces, both authors cut loose from the ordinary way of looking at known things and deliberately distort perception and seeing. Theme of Petra Bošanská is mainly city environment. She creates sort of a city of her own, that exists only on the photos. She creates a space under the sky, once dramaticaly cloudy and other times blue with white cushions of clouds or shiny with rays of just risen sun. She doesn’t present this as the real world, but instead giving it a character of card-board model or very short-cut film scenery. Simple flats of buildings with black windows, as if having blind eyes, reminding well-known scenery of places, unfortunately some with half-build objects of feral developer companies that can easily invade the existing urbanistic wholes, brutally damage their harmony with blocks of concrete. In another cases, Petra Bošanská takes advantage of the scene by implementing artificial, card-board buildings or objects.

In contrast, young Finnish Maija Laurinen, who works in Slovenia, reflects the opposite face of a landscape - clean, unclaimed, undefiled, natural. Her pictures have a character of a hint - instinctive grab of space. While looking at her photographies, you can feel memories of archetypical landscape slowly emerging from our unconsciousness. Images of trees and horizon feathering away, transform into abstract pictures that push your curiosity and imagination even further.

Anna Maxim

curator of the exhibition