Gothic Panel Painting and Plastic Art

New permanent exhibition BIATEC. Celtic Mint, prepared by the Municipal Monument Preservation Institute Bratislava (MÚOP) in cooperation with Bratislava City Gallery (GMB), presents cultural heritage through visual stories. Combining architectural design of a relatively small space with modern digital technologies brings rich content to the audience through interactive processing.

In the gallery, the set up environment slumbers and waits for you to bring it to life. It hungers for human presence. It will become fulfilled when you expose your body to its effects and pour your content into it. If you let it, it enters through your skin, your mucosa, your cornea, your inner ear. It will be touching you intimately until it swallows you completely. Inside, you will encounter matter, smooth and skeletal, ripening and oozing. You’ll experience thickening fibres and shivering tissues, you'll deal with pliable bones and unyielding gravitation. In viscera, there is nothing you can do but rely on your senses. Blind to meanings, they bypass the mind and return you to the folds of your own body. You will wake to the inside. You will remember that you are matter like any other, bound to the same cycles like the rest of the living and dying world. Afterall, your existence is neither your merit, nor your fault. Wash your feet, you will need to take off your shoes.

Bratislava is a city of contrasts. Within its boundaries, organically formed historic districts, fragments of modern architectural and urban plans, and urban wildernesses where seemingly nothing exists all meet within a radius of several hundred metres. As in Colin Rowe's collage city, different visions of the shape of the city have settled side by side. Their proximity is in some places friendly, in others reticent or even antagonistic. At first glance, therefore, Bratislava looks fragmented and unplanned. Its current form, however, is the result of efforts of dozens of planners who for more than 120 years have been trying to organise the city spatially.

The installation Totems comprises a series of five unique sculptures made of burnt books on concrete bases. Individual book titles are not recognisable, however, as in the process of burning they merged into a complete sculptural work that reflect wellknown geometric forms, for example Brancusi’s pedestal sculptures, and in terms of content is connected with social utopias in the tradition of artistic avant-gardes of futurism or constructivism. Authors who systematically analyse regimes of patriarchally constructed female representation work with books as symbols of literacy, a purportedly masculine and unquestionable sign of progress. From the books, which form majestic objects in a new vertical arrangement and suggest the fragility of burning, they created irrational, difficult to verbalise, totemic figures of the language of the sculptural work.

As part of their emancipatory efforts, period neo-avant-gardes of the 1960s and 1970s experimented with breaking the boundaries of the surface or expanding the classical painting medium into intermedia environments in order to free themselves from the formal demands placed on traditional formats.