Will I Ever Look Into Your Eyes Again?

The exhibition taking place in Šopa Gallery brings together three artists – Katarína Bajkayová, Paula Malinowska and Klaudia Kosziba. Despite the different media they use (ceramics, painting, 3D digital animation), their interests have been meeting for a long time. The current exhibition in Košice has drawn clearer contours of this quiet dialogue. The artists nar- rate short stories of organisms, with jellyfish or various species of mush- rooms in main actress roles. The narrators are not omniscient, some are even frozen in time, petrified, and communicating only through their ma- terials, shapes, or brush strokes (Bajkayová, Kosziba). On the 54 square meter stage, themes of transformation, rebirth, eroticism, sex, or some kind of strange alien love are slowly revealed. Bajkayová, Malinowska and Kosziba simply test our sensitivity and reflect on the possibilities of seeing full, essential life in nature once again. The title of the exhibition is inspired by an excerpt from the song The End by The Doors. Erik Vilím’s curator essay will be available in the gallery as an accompanying material, in which the aforementioned topics are discussed in deeper philosophical levels. This text offers the key to decipher the en- tire exhibition - the word “love”. This challenging text will be complement- ed by the concurrent lecture by Václav Janoščík, a pedagogue, theoretician and curator, currently based at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. Paula Malinowska (born 1998) received her master’s degree at the Department of Intermedia at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava (2020–2022) and worked specifically in the vvv studio (Dávid Koronczi and Martin Piaček). She set the foundations of her work in the theme of Anthropocene and our relation to non-human reality. She interprets the topic via mythology which she “undermines” with new readings and reveals new contexts hiding within. In her current project for the Šopa Gallery, Paula uses 3D animation again. The main character is a jellyfish she found while strolling the beach in Portugal in June 2023. The video artwork was created at a time the art- ist was processing the loss of a beloved person. The themes of death, initiation and termination, and the eternal cycle naturally emerge from the presented video artwork. For Malinowska, the starting point was the story of Medusa from Greek mythology. However, this narrative almost completely disappears in the video and the artist points the limelight on a living actor – the jellyfish that is able to reverse its life cycle. In this backstory we can find, among other things, a hidden and non-invasive critique of the understanding of death in Western philosophy. The work bears elements of dreamy fiction, emphasizing the overall visual atmos- phere rather than the logical sequence of the narration. It was created in collaboration with Andrej Žabkay (audio) and Vladimíra Vrbiňáková (ed- iting). The video is complemented by a design furniture piece Physaria Chair (2023) by Barbora Hagara and Data[LAB] (FAD STU), whose shape is inspired by the growth of an organism. Katarína Bajkayová (born 1994) completed her M.A. studies in the Faculty of Arts of the Technical University in Košice, where she currently takes her PhD course. She mainly creates of spatial installations using ce- ramics in combination with other materials. Currently, she is particularly interested in the topics of social relations, housing, and eroticism, which she explores in the context of natural sciences, mythology, architecture and literature. Her source of inspiration for the current presentation in the Šopa Gallery in the life of fungi, primarily their ability of mutual care and reproduction. Katarína asks herself how we can get access to these traits. In doing so, she focuses on aphrodisiac mushrooms. The new series of her artworks will thus consist of ceramic objects whose shapes are based on real mushrooms with aphrodisiac effects. In doing so, she winds her reflections around the context of the ideas of Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, and Alain Badiou. Klaudia Kosziba (born 1971) rounds up the selection of artists with a dis- tinctly painter’s approach, while, like Bajkayová, she devotes her atten- tion to mushrooms. Kosziba has focused on paintings in long term, includ- ing the way of their representation or historical transformations. In her recent paintings, she reflects her direct experience with mushrooms, trac- ing the metamorphosis of their aesthetic qualities, growth, or cessation. As in Malinowska’s case, ancient Greek culture stretched the canvas for her artistic decisions (think of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, for example). This environment is already present in the title of the entire Hymenophore series, which refers to the mythological Hymen, the god of marriage. The second meaning is linked with the anatomy of fungi, referring to the fila- ment structures that expel spores. In layman’s terms, these are actually fungi’s reproductive organs. It is no coincidence that her works share the gallery space with the works of Katarína Bajkayová as well as the shape interpretation of aphrodisiac mushrooms, so that they ultimately come to life together in their full symbolic potential. Klaudia Kosziba is a painter and teacher at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava. She has been the leading persona of the Ateliér mal+by since 2008. The exhibitions of this gallery are supported using public funding by the Slovak Arts Council. The Slovak Arts Council is the main partner of the project.