Modern & Contemporary Art Exhibitions in Bratislava

Between Thread and Territory explores the invisible connections that weave together our spaces, identities and memories. The “thread” — a strand, a line, a trajectory — evokes the artisanal gesture, the transmission of stories and the networks that shape contemporary life. “Territory”, meanwhile, refers not only to the physical and political spaces we inhabit, but also to the intimate and emotional landscapes we carry within us. Bringing together matali crasset (France), Simone Fattal (Lebanon), Daniela Mikulášková (Czech Republic), Natasza Niedziółka (Poland) and Eva Vañová (Slovakia), the exhibition creates a dialogue between five singular artistic practices and distinct cultural geographies. Through textiles, fibres, forms, colours and repeated gestures, the artists explore the ways in which real or symbolic threads traverse territories — crossing borders, landscapes, bodies, histories and archives. Here, works are not merely materials: they become surfaces of memory, spaces of resistance and transformation, and instruments through which individual and shared histories can be rewritten. Works become maps, maps become narratives, and narratives unfold like lines in motion. Some works resonate with experiences of displacement, migration and diaspora; others trace inner, domestic or imaginary territories. Together, they raise a shared question: how is a territory constructed through traces, connections, ruptures and gestures repeated over time? Between Thread and Territory invites visitors to move through these to follow the threads that connect one work, one place and one memory to another — and to consider territory not as a fixed boundary, but as a living fabric, continuously woven and transformed.

Already at the age of sixteen, Alex Mlynárčik (born in 1934 in Žilina) was sentenced to one year in prison for attempting to escape to Austria. He was captured while still in the Soviet occupation zone and sent to a prison in České Budějovice. He regarded the only positive trace of this traumatic experience as the scratches and inscriptions carved with fingernails into the prison walls — messages left by anonymous people to other anonymous people, silent testimonies of human presence and hope. This experience became a recurring motif throughout his artistic work.

Deutsche Bank honors Lucia Tallová as "Artist of the Year" 2026... Her "Artist of the Year" award recognizes the relevance of Tallová's poetic exploration...