SELMECI KOCKA JUSKO

TOWER PART 1

Tower part 1 at Šopa Gallery is one of a cycle of three simultaneously running exhibitions. The second part is presented at VUNU Košice, and the last one at Hunt Kastner Gallery in Prague.

The exhibition builds on the authors’ long-term interest in the motif of the container. Containers as bags – tools for carrying things, as means for transmitting information, or conversely as cases for storing, hiding, or dwelling, where home is just another larger pocket, a container for people. In the context of small-scale and animal architecture, it develops thinking about forms of habitation, coexistence, vulnerability, and mechanisms of control.

Selmeci Kocka Jusko (Alex Selmeci and Tomáš Kocka Jusko) work as an artistic duo. They examine the relationship between visual representation, memory, and perception, using experimental approaches to the structure of exhibition space. They create complex intermedia installations or, conversely, present collections of physical objects that function as energy capsules. In their practice, they often employ soft technologies of repair and provisional structures, emphasising permeability over closure. They experiment with measurement systems and use intuitive methods to explore how time, scale, and quantity can be embodied in material form. Their work also addresses the relationship between labour, exhaustion, and imagination, perceiving artistic practice not only as a form of production but also as a modest utopian gesture of attention and empathy. Through strategies of slowness and retreat, Selmeci and Kocka Jusko reflect on forms of resistance to acceleration and precarity, imagining post-work scenarios and possibilities for ecological regeneration.

The realisation of the works was supported using public funding in the form of a scholarship by the Slovak Arts Council. The project was also supported by the City of Košice and the Košice Self-Governing Region.