FRIDAY Oct 11, 18:00 @ Parter BCS
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At the turn of the millennium, Svätopluk Mikyta began drawing his memories of Orava, encapsulating them in an expansive series of drawings of sprouting potatoes, their shoots reaching toward the light. His “potato period” culminated in 2008, a year he dedicated to the plant, which first came to Europe as war booty in the hull of Spanish colonizers’ ships, and soon found its way onto our “Slavic” plates. Mikyta interprets the potato as a molecule, a building block of the nation: potato pancakes, potato dough, potato “fučka,” baked potato, boiled potato, Slovakia chips… a potato land with a potato tricolor.
A warm, baked potato will keep us cozy on Friday evening at the playground next to PARTER BSC gallery during the opening of JAMA 78, which will include a screening prepared by Zuzana Bodnárová and Svätopluk Mikyta.
They will present the 40-minute film Stories for Inner Need (2015) by Michal Moravčík and Jana Kapelová—a film about Orava, drawing, art, potato pits, and Svätopluk Mikyta’s childhood, with stories that take on a life of their own.
In case of bad weather, the event will move indoors to Banská St a nica Contemporary.
Svätopluk Mikyta is a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava and the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Stuttgart. He was a DAAD scholarship recipient at the Universität der Künste in Berlin and is the winner of the Oskár Čepan Award (2008) and the Tatranský Tiger Award. He completed a residency at ISCP New York (2009) and won the Strabag Art Award for Central Europe (2011). He leads the Drawing and Graphics Studio at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Brno University of Technology. Alongside Zuzana Bodnárová, he founded the art center Banská St a nica Contemporary in Banská Štiavnica (2009). He also engages in curatorial work, organizes workshops for the public, and advocates for the popularization of art and culture, especially in rural areas. He lives and works in Central Slovakia.
Zuzana Bodnárová studied Art History at the Faculty of Arts at Comenius University in Bratislava. After spending several years in Prague working at the Center for Central European Architecture (CCEA), she moved to Banská Štiavnica in 2009, where she co-founded Banská St a nica Contemporary (BSC) with Svätopluk Mikyta. For over a decade, she has initiated and organized residencies, connected people, published books, and curated exhibitions. In 2021, she founded the SKUSY project, together with Lucia Tkáčová and Tamara Kametani, organizing residencies for Slovak artists in Athens. She enjoys conversation, often publishing collected interviews online at teren.online. She frequently prefers to stay in the background.
LANGUAGE: SLOVAK
