Fairs
Katarína Bajkayová & Svetlana Fialová
Hypothetical Situations
The Others Art Fair
Torino Esposizioni, Pavilion 3
Via Francesco Petrarca 39/B – 10126, Turin
02-05/11/2023
The project showcases the current work of two contemporary female visual artists, Katarína Bajkayová and Svetlana Fialová. It intends to highlight the importance of Slovakian art, especially by female artists, in the global context. The artist’s works have been selected by the curator Petra Sedlák Housková with a focus on the ongoing discourse of gender equality in relation to motherhood, social status, values, interpersonal relationships, and responsibility toward the world.
Svetlana Fialová’s work is influenced by her residency in Tokyo, where she mastered the ukiyo-e technique. She creates compositions related to motherhood, parenting, and family life. Her recent series features figurative scenes dominated by portrait depictions, combining graphic engraving with expressive drawing. Her most personal series references the emotional fragmentation of motherhood but also strength, determination, resilience, and an unrelenting drive to control one’s life.
Suggestive reliefs and ceramic objects of Katarína Bajkayová refer to the question of responsibility. In the current political and economic situation, or in times of environmental and housing crisis, pondering whether to bring a child into the world today becomes a complex polemic. From the fear of global problems and the frustration of the responsibility “for two” escapes to questions of love and intimate relationships, but consequently to their instrumentalization or destruction.
Katarína Bajkayová (*1994, Košice) belongs to the younger generation of artists who have only recently entered the Slovak art scene. She graduated from the Faculty of Arts of the Technical University in Košice – Studio of Free Creativity 3D and is currently a PhD student. Her work is based on the search for the metaphorical and symbolic potential of natural and architectural spaces. Programmatically, she uses the aesthetics of applied art to refer to our everyday life through it. She is mainly engaged in creating spatial installations; she uses ceramics in combination with other materials. Currently, she is particularly interested in the themes of social relations, living, and eroticism, which she explores in the contexts of natural sciences, architecture, and literature. So far, she has exhibited in Slovakia and the Czech Republic.
Svetlana Fialová (*1985, Košice) currently lives and works in Košice. She studied at the Faculty of Arts of the Technical University in Košice (2008) and finished her Master’s degree at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (2010). She completed her doctoral studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava (2015) under the supervision of Prof. Daniel Fischer. She works as an assistant professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Košice in the Studio of Graphic and Experimental Design under Prof. Petr Rónai. In 2013, she was a laureate of the Jerwood Drawing Prize; in 2012, 2015, and 2020, she was a finalist of the VÚB Painting of the Year Award; in 2011, a finalist of the Essl Art Award and the Critics’ Prize for Young Painting, and in 2016 she was one of the finalists of the Novum Foundation Prize. Fialová completed a year-long internship at London’s Red Gallery and participated in a residency at Youkobo Art Space in Tokyo (2018 – 2019). She has exhibited solo in Paris, Vienna, Prague, Bratislava and Košice. In 2021, Šopa Gallery published her first comprehensive monograph.
Supported using public funding by Slovak Arts Council.
The Slovak Arts Council is the main partner of the project.
