TRANZIT SK - Bratislava

The exhibition presents a new chapter of Ana de Almeida’s ongoing Collective Archive project (since 2014), which explores the poetics and politics of the archive, and the dynamics of personal and collective remembrance. At its core are photographs taken by the artist’s father, a Portuguese student in former Czechoslovakia between 1978 and 1987. Shot without artistic ambition, the images carry the imprint of a political commitment shaped by Portugal’s Carnation Revolution (1974), which ended decades of dictatorship and colonial war. That revolutionary spirit extended into his experience of everyday life in socialist Czechoslovakia during the years leading up to the Velvet Revolution (1989). By activating this material in sculptural and video installations, de Almeida invites reflection on how revolutionary euphoria is displaced, how memory and nostalgia are transmitted across generations, and how historical moments of social upheaval resonate in today’s climate of disillusionment, depoliticization, and the resurgence of ultraconservative and far-right forces. While institutional archives often rely on photography as indexical proof of the past, de Almeida resists this logic. Instead of fixing historical moments, her sculptural displays open spaces for contemplation, suspension, and the fugitive release of the political potential of the images they contain. Similarly, her video works, employing lip-reading and sign language, situate the semiotics of revolution in an ongoing process of translation. In this way, her understanding of the archive is relational and performative. Alongside a new sculptural work created specifically for tranzit.sk’s study room, the exhibition also presents the results of a workshop with young Bratislava-based artists who engaged with their own photographic archives. Their collective project searches for moments of resistance and explores the connections between domestic, institutional, private, and collective realms.

Lectures, discussion forums, screenings Art is credited with the ability to bring (radically) new, critical insights which bear transformative potential. It sensitively reflects and critically comments on negative phenomena in society, inequality and injustice, political oppression as well as unsustainable economic arrangements, and the exploitation of communities and the entire planet. But what about the exploitation and injustice embedded in the operation of the art system itself? What about solidarity when one of the main principles of the art world is competition - for resources, attention, and individual success? The criticism of negative phenomena ”outside the art world” often neglects the fact that the same negative aspects are reproduced “inside the art world” governed by its own priorities and modes of production. With its overproduction and emphasis on individuality and flexibility, the art world closely models the neoliberal economy. However open and tolerant it may seem, the art scene reproduces gender, racial, and class inequalities; and just as art institutions once participated in the "extraction" of the cultural heritage of colonized nations and by doing so helped legitimize colonial violence, they now participate in legitimizing those responsible for the extraction of natural and human resources and for environmental and planetary destruction. Today, at a time marked by multiple crises, and especially by the endangered situation of culture and cultural production in Slovakia, we wish to focus on critical voices, discourses that look introspectively and critically at art and its modes of production, and examine it from various viewpoints with a stress on anticapitalist, feminist, decolonial, and ecological perspectives. We believe that in the long-run art can fulfill its emancipatory function if the art system itself undergoes positive change. Thus the series aims to foster dialogue on the possibilities of reforming the art system along the principles of sustainability, subsistence, justice, care, inclusion and wellbeing, and on practices which test different, more just modes of production and instituting.