LINGUA FRANCA

7. 12. 2023 - 24. 3. 2024

The exhibition entitled “Lingua franca” presents an intergenerational dialogue between Brazilian and Slovak artists who, against the backdrop of daily life, wrest an openness and poetic reverberation while moving beyond the immense field of the spectacle. These evocative works emerged from the acute urge to relate to their surroundings with simple and subtle gestures and minimal displacements that ramify into social, ecological, historical, political, anthropological and philosophical concerns that are dilated into a time span of more than five decades.
Marcius Galan: Line Weight, 2017, Concrete, wool string, 38 x 200 x 100 cm
Marcius Galan: Line Weight, 2017, Concrete, wool string, 38 x 200 x 100 cm. Photo Marcus Schneider, courtesy Gregor Podnar, Vienna.
“Lingua franca” alludes to a common poetics spoken by the selected artists, but at the same time emphasizes the impossibility of these connections, not only due to the artists different cultural backgrounds, but also to the fallacy that exists when categorizing or relating said poetics, emphasizing that behind this exercise lies a subjectivity that makes it possible. The enterprise of tying together artists from different cultures will be exercised through the writing of a long narrative text in the form of first-person fiction. The Brazilian artist and activist André Komatsu (São Paulo, 1978) and the Slovak artist and writer Petra Feriancová (Bratislava, 1977) developed a collaborative hybrid-museographic installation ex profeso for this context that will serve as the exhibition backbone and the embodiment of a lingua franca between two cultures; a poetic way to notice connections rather than differences, to increase our sense of empathy and shared humanity.
Authors: Lenora de Barros, Juraj Bartoš, Peter Bartoš, Anna Daučíková, Ľubomír Ďurček, Petra Feriancová, Marcius Galan, Július Koller, André Komatsu, Maria Noujaim, Leticia Parente, Marco Paulo Rolla, Jana Želibská

LINGUA FRANCA

Exhibition Catalogue

Brazilian writer Tiago de Abreu Pinto (1984, Salvador), curator of the exhibition and author of the publication LINGUA FRANCA, uses writing to seek and find the universal language of contemporary art – within the work of Brazilian and Slovak conceptual artists.
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