TRANZIT SK

The exhibition focuses on emotions amid the tension between multiple contemporary crises and an increasingly polarised political climate. It responds to a situation in which systemic extraction, political manipulation, and enforced self-repression collide with the basic need for fulfilment, happiness, and hope. The artworks on display reflect on the formation of emotional maturity through upbringing, education and social norms. They explore ways how anxiety can be addressed, empathy fostered, loss overcome and hostile forces resisted. Moreover, they articulate the urgency of collective healing, mutual care, and sustaining hope in uncertain times—while recognising quiet resilience, small everyday gestures that surface in the cracks of the system.

A project by Matej Gavula and Jonáš Gruska Opening: 6. February, 2022 at 6 p.m. Accompanied by a concert by Medlen jr. Venue: tranzit.sk, Beskydská 12, Bratislava Open: Tuesday – Friday: 2:30 p.m. – 6:30 p.m. We are in the seemingly desolate environment of “donkeys” in the oil fields scattered among the pine forests around Malacky. They dynamically pump oil and create a kind of imaginary “pulse” of fossil extractivism characteristic of the current economic system. Their gradual decomposition and rusting offer a picture of a world where fossil resources cease to play their previous role — whether due to the transition to more sustainable alternatives, the emergence of a miraculous invention, or the extinction of humanity. Before the donkeys, there was Ján Medlen, a homo faber from Gbely. He didn’t like corners and nooks where, according to him, negative energy is concentrated. He preferred circles and bubbles, organic and flowing, boundless. That is how he became an architect. He exchanged fertile soil for wetlands, which are in motion like an element. He discovered gas leaking from the ground and was not afraid to work with it. Underneath it lay the oil which the state seized and began to use to fuel the machinery of war. Oil is the detonator and fuel of military conflicts to this day. This exhibition entitled Man Has Emerged Triumphant explores oil extraction in the Záhorie region, the history and possible future of a society built on extraction, and a creative and curious man who worked with the essence from the bowels of the earth. Sound plays a central role: the suction and movement from one cavity to another shape the architecture of the exhibition. The barrel becomes Medlen's rotunda, and concrete and bronze castings function as allegories of fossil form and density. Archival photographs and video footage of explosions reveal an invisible landscape — one that continues to ferment beneath the surface and seep into the present. Text: Matej Gavula a Jonáš Gruska