Ľ. S. (de)materialised

Ľuba Sajkalová brought to the art scene themes of ecology and community, ethnographic sensitivity, the phenomenon of memory and family history, and material empathy. Her work is characterised by processualism and openness, participation, gender sensitivity and "predetermination", social context, the ecological principle (sustainability and decomposability), and the method of "creative" procrastination and slow creation. She transferred procedural approaches from her creative work to her pedagogical work – she worked at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design and participated in the educational programmes of several galleries, including the Slovak National Gallery, Bratislava City Gallery, Kunsthalle Bratislava, and Bibiana.

The exhibition showcases the artist's most important works, as well as fragments of installations that today exist only in documentation or in torso form. It also demonstrates her creative partnership with Eva Masaryková, as well as selective affinities with the work of Ján Sajkala and Dana Sochorová and Zdeno Hogh. It portrays Ľuba Sajkalová as a person of collaboration – above and beyond the final artefact, at the centre of her interest and work were relationships, processes, and stories. The ambition of the exhibition is not only to unveil an artist whose career was prematurely curtailed by illness and whose work did not have time to fully develop, it is also to show what an original and "combustive" personality she was, how adept at initiating cooperation, those she inspi