Time Solidifies Elsewhere at SODA / Bratislava

Ilona Németh and Lucia Tkáčová / Time Solidifies Elsewhere

December 10 - 31 January, 2020 

SODA gallery
Školská 10 
811 07 Bratislava 1
Slovakia

















All images courtesy of SODA gallery
Photos: Adam Šakový

Time Solidifies Elsewhere is an exhibition originally conceived for the site of the Jozef Kollár Gallery in Banská Štiavnica. It is an assembly of objects of diverse nature and designation, that have accumulated within the building of GaJK over the past decades. Ilona Németh and Lucia Tkáčová chose to work with objects which, despite not being artworks, inhabited the exhibition spaces, ambiguous in their placement and purpose.  These objects, perceived as materialised deposits of time, embody the recent history of the GaJK building, as well as the human decisions that shape it.

This exhibition acts as a second chapter to Time Solidifies at Its Core at GaJK. The site-specific installations have been transported into the white cube of SODA Gallery, with the intent of liberating them from their provenance;  severing their ties to their native environment and function. Their placement in a contemporary art gallery aims to further the experiment on perceiving these objects, on determining their classification and value. Their relocation into the context of SODA Gallery beckons us to view them purely as objects of art and focus on their formal, aesthetic and depoliticized presence.

The repurposed objects are of various origins: the bulk of a gallery display system specifically designed for GaJK in 1989 by architects Vojtech Novotný and Ján Mutkovič and various furniture that used to clutter the exhibition rooms. The office blinds, as well as a congregation of dehumidifiers, procured from a Norway Grant in 2010, remain at the Jozef Kollar Gallery as long-term installations; assembled into a fragile triumphal arch and a circular gathering respectively. A meta layer of the exhibition is an uncluttered GaJK, freed from the accumulation of time. After Time Solidifies Elsewhere, the objects will be returned to their former biotope; the gallery in Banská Štiavnica, where their faith will once again be in the hands of the people who work in it and shape it everyday.

- Lucia Tkáčová