Identity
Winner: Secondary Vocational School of Woodworking, Spišská Nová Ves
Final: Slovak National Gallery, Bratislava, 4 May 2018
Jury: jury chair – Jaroslav Kyša, Barbora Danišová and Barbora Tribulová from the SNG, Petra Filipiaková from the East Slovak Gallery in Košice, Lucia Kotvanová from Kunsthalle Bratislava, and Martina Martincová from the Central Slovak Gallery
The second year of the international art competition for secondary school and grammar school students, Máš umelecké črevo? 2017/2018, culminated at the Berlinka café in the Slovak National Gallery with a presentation of the finalists’ works and the announcement of the winners. Eight teams advanced to the final from the original approximately eighty from all over Slovakia. These eight teams had the opportunity to exhibit their projects in the basement of the SNG, where they can also be seen by the general public for the duration of the exhibition. All finalists had to present their works to the audience and defend them before a jury made up of representatives of partner galleries. This year the jury was chaired by the young intermedia artist Jaroslav Kyša, who performed his role excellently and announced the three award-winning teams.
The jury had a truly difficult task, because all the final projects were interesting and approached this year’s theme, Identity, in their own distinctive way. In the end, they agreed to award third place to the project Artistic Identity Today, prepared under the guidance of Marianna Mlynárčiková by Daniel Brezáni, Frederika Lukáčová, Leonard Seres, and Viliam Srnka from the Secondary Vocational School of Information Technologies in Banská Bystrica. They created profiles of four Slovak avant-garde artists on a social network, where the artists communicate with one another, evaluate each other’s work, and thus present it to a young generation. In doing so, the authors drew on period sources, especially the Private Letters of Ľudovít Fulla and Mikuláš Galanda.
Second place went to the highly elaborate video installation The Invisible. Sandy Minďaš, Lucia Nováková, and Blažena Machavová from the Secondary School of Applied Arts of Scenic Design in Bratislava, under the guidance of Jakub Michel, draw viewers into the issues of being transgender. A video animation containing their personal testimonies is complemented by an installation with statements by other transsexual people, placed in a narrow corridor that evokes a feeling of confinement to the sound of water dripping into a glass of patience.
Although the battle for victory was very close, the jury ultimately decided to award first place to the project Variette by Vanesa Múdrá and Annamária Bednárová from the Secondary Vocational School of Woodworking in Spišská Nová Ves, who, under the guidance of Michal Daňek, created a virtual identity named Variette. This identity integrates the unity of both authors; it is a fusion of their appearance, voice, and life. On social networks, the authors managed to convince others of this person’s existence, after which they themselves, from their own accounts, issued a warning to those discussing the fake identity and studied their reactions. The output of the project is a video recording in which the virtual identity explains its existence as dependent on gullibility.
Although only three projects received awards, all the finalists approached the theme of Identity with real creativity. Whether it was a project that explored giving up identity by giving up one’s hair, or a project collecting identities at school on index cards. Some concealed their identity beneath a scratch-off layer and leave it to the exhibition visitor to reveal it; others uncovered their identity through sculptural self-portraits or a Dadaist-Surrealist animation. These projects demonstrated the maturity of the authors in creatively processing a current theme, and we are therefore pleased that all finalists were also able to take home a small award in the form of diplomas and gifts related to the graphic identity of the current year of the competition, created by graphic designer Ivana Palečková.
