PERFORMANCE PROGRAM
curated di Lýdia Pribišová
Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava
The project, entitled TEMPORARY STOP, presents previously unseen works created by students at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava.
The programme features works by VŠVU students Martin Druska, Emília Gurová, Milota Mikulová and Jelisaveta Rapaić. It is curated by artist and educator Maja Štefančíková and builds on her long-term engagement with performance and the body as an artistic medium.
Responding to the theme of the 15th edition of The Others, the works explore different forms of control, restriction and transformation. The programme approaches the body not as something fixed, but as something continuously shaped by social, spatial and political conditions. Moving between personal and collective experience, the works address queer rights and social stagnation, gender expectations, physical limits, regulated urban spaces, labour and systems of production.
Martin Druska addresses queer rights, social stagnation and the tension between the passage of time and the absence of social change. Emília Gurová explores gender expectations and the physical limits placed on the body. Milota Mikulová examines rules, controlled environments and the relationship between the body and regulated space. Jelisaveta Rapaić focuses on labor, repetition, and systems of production.
The Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava (AFAD/VŠVU) is the largest art and design university in Slovakia, offering education across fine arts, design, architecture, conservation and art theory.
Martin Druska: October 12, 2022
Performance, 2026
Duration: 30 min.
Time passes, but change does not come. The performance explores the paradox of the constant passage of time and a society that remains stagnant or even moves backward. It is based on the terrorist attack outside Bratislava’s Tepláreň on October 12, 2022, in which Juraj Vankulič and Matúš Horváth were murdered and Radka Trokšiarová was injured. Frustration with persistent inequality clashes with the resilience of the queer community, which continues to demand change. The audience gradually becomes part of this ongoing struggle.
Emília Gurová: Emergence
Performance, Scultura in ceramica, 2026
Duration: 3 min.
Emergence reinterprets the historical figure of the caryatid through a contemporary feminist perspective. The body becomes an architectural support, holding a ceramic capital until fatigue reveals its limits. Lowering the capital does not signify failure, but a return from structure to a living presence.
Milota Mikulová: Play with the scale
Performance, Proiezione video, 2026
Duration: 15 min.
Performer: Tereza Pavlíková, Julia Pabst, Emanuela Bátkyová, Ivanna Burykina, Zuzana Golitková, Sebastián Krištofík, Maria Krepkova, Natália Porvazníková, Alica Maletičová, Tomáš Brichta, Jonáš Mačinga
The performance takes place in the parking lot as a space of constrain circulation, where a movement is directed by rules, signs, and boundaries. Its controlled logic is transferred onto the human body, raising the question of what happens when we begin to lose control within a highly regulated environment. Through play, repetition and shifting rules, the work explores the tension between being controlled and controlling.
Jelisaveta Rapaić: Legal fiction of a handbag
Performance, installazione tessile attivata, 2026
Duration: ND
Legal fiction of a handbag is a performance-activated textile installation that merges personal, non-human, and bureaucratic tales with factual records. It is essentially a genesis piece combining utility, optimization, paperwork, craft, and questionable working conditions, reflecting the journey of a handbag from the Balkans to the fashion capitals of Europe.
NABA | NUOVA ACCADEMIA DI BELLE ARTI
The project THE BODY OF MEMORY is realized by students at NABA | Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti.
Memory is not so much something we have as something we are. If gesture is understood as the element that shapes our relationship with others, it can be seen as the very dwelling place of memory, both personal and collective, where remembrance is continually expressed and awakened.
Curated by artist and lecturer Jacopo Martinotti, the performances presented by students from NABA’s BA programme in Painting and Visual Arts and MA programme in Visual Arts and Curatorial Studies at the Milan campus reflect on gestural language as both a habit and a site of memory. Rituals and repetitions become spaces in which memory resurfaces as a collective possibility.
Anna Turinetti: Sulla lingua in generale
Performance, 2026
Duration: 30 min.
The performance Sulla lingua in generale explores language and its relationship with the audience through quotation. The artist uses encounters with viewers to convey a short message taken from Walter Benjamin’s essay On Language as Such and on the Language of Man (1916), from which the work takes its title. In doing so, it reflects on communicability, naming, and the relationship between signifier, signified and referent. This suspended encounter, too brief to become a dialogue, takes the form of a kind of intellectual epiphany which, despite its fleeting nature—or perhaps precisely because of it—leaves the audience with an impression to reflect upon.
Benedetta Cerea: Absent Bodies
Performance, 2026
Duration: ND
Within the exhibition space, crosses made of iron powder are scattered like traces of a collective memory, evoking absent bodies and lives cut short by the horrors of the contemporary world. The cross, a symbol of sacrifice and loss, sheds its traditional monumentality to become a fragile presence dispersed throughout the space, bearing witness to what remains after disappearance. The powder becomes the material embodiment of memory: it symbolically holds absence and restores visibility to those who are no longer here, transforming the space into a place of contemplation and awareness.
The ephemeral nature of the work invites reflection on the fragility of existence and the precariousness of remembrance, suspended between the need to preserve memory and the inevitability of its transformation. The crosses do not assert themselves as permanent monuments, but offer themselves to viewers as temporary presences, fragments of a memory that traverses the space and speaks to the present. Absent Bodies thus becomes a means of commemoration and an appeal to responsibility, inviting us to recognise, in the absence of bodies, the persistence of their stories and the need not to forget.
Vittoria Boffi: Dama
Performance, 2026
Duration: ND
The performance Dama weaves together the gestural memory of the nineteenth century and the emergence of the first moving images. A female figure, dressed in an elegant nineteenth-century lady’s gown, moves through the space, unfolding the action in several stages: from moments of silent interaction guided solely by the rigid yet seductive “language of the fan” to performative actions centred on the use of pre-cinematic devices such as the magic lantern. It is a performative journey through period gestures and the archaeology of vision, where optical illusion and the unspoken word merge into a single moving narrative.
Monika Mon Babreclova: Sonar
Site-specific performance action, 2024
Performer: MON NOW
Duration: 10 min.
SONAR is a site-specific performance action emerging from long-term research into the body under spatial constraints and how a restricted body operates within and inhabits space. Through the presence, movement and sound of the body, the performance activates the space and explores how spatial limitations shape bodily movement and perception.
The research is accompanied by Notes on Movement, a series of performance notations mapping movement traces and the locations where the actions take place.
For The Others Art Fair, SONAR will be adapted to the specific conditions of the space, continuing its exploration of perception, space, time and energy through a collective experience.
SCHEDULE
Friday, October 30
4.00 pm
Anna Turinetti, Sulla lingua in generale
Benedetta Cerea, Absent Bodies
Vittoria Boffi, Dama
Monika Mon Babreclova, Sonar
6.30 pm
Milota Mikulová, Play with the scale
7.00 pm
Martin Druska, October 12, 2022
7.30 pm
Jelisaveta Rapaić, Legal fiction of a handbag
8.00 pm
Emília Gurová, Emergence
Saturday, October 31
11.00 am
Anna Turinetti, Sulla lingua in generale
Benedetta Cerea, Absent Bodies
Vittoria Boffi, Dama
Monika Mon Babreclova, Sonar
6.00 pm
Milota Mikulová, Play with the scale
6.30 pm
Martin Druska, October 12, 2022
7.00 pm
Jelisaveta Rapaić, Legal fiction of a handbag
7.30
Emília Gurová, Emergence