JANA ŠTURDÍKOVÁ

HOUSE

OPENING: 20. 2. 2024 AT 7 PM
EXHIBITION: 21. 2. – 30. 3. 2024

Switches, tiles, handles, sockets, elevator call buttons. The ordinary details of houses and apartments that we see every day. They’re firmly anchored in our consciousness, but we don’t pay attention to them. We may not even be able to recall them exactly, but we certainly don’t think of photographing them.
Jana Šturdíková has spent more than ten years photographing the life of objects in an ordinary Bratislava functionalist house built by the Jewish architect Alexander Skutecky, conceptually mapping the historical and contemporary layers of architecture and interior design. From the boiler room to the lightning rod and in ten apartments, she searched for original elements that have survived since the house was built in 1936. She observed how they have been altered, preserved or replaced under the impact of daily use. She followed in detail how the great historical events of the 20th and 21st centuries, typical for the countries of Central Europe, have passed through the house. Arization, World War II, nationalization or restitution have had an impact on seemingly insignificant details that we are accustomed to interacting with every day.
Jana Šturdíková (*1983) studied dramaturgy at the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava, photography at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava, and at the Institute of Creative Photography at the Silesian University in Opava. She has exhibited at the Month of Photography festivals in Bratislava or Mois de la Photo in Paris and other exhibitions in Slovakia and abroad. Since 2015, she has been working on an extensive photographic project “Our Châteaux” about dilapidated castles in Slovakia, which was published in the form of a successful photographic book. Her latest project, House, is also published as an extensive photographic publication. www.janasturdikova.com

The exhibition takes place within the framework of the FOTOGRAFIC STARTUP platform, which focus on the presentation of works of emerging artists with the aim to become a pivotal point in their career.