Opening: 5.12.2008, 6pm

In her photographs and videos, the Slovak artist Lucia Nimcova focuses on the visual codes of her homeland’s Communist past and pursues the traces of this past in the present day.

For her extensive project UNOFFICIAL, she spent two years doing in-depth research into the history of her birthplace, the town of Humenné in eastern Slovakia, combing the official picture archives as well as pictures made by amateur photographers for historical documentation of the everyday world.

Nimcova places the photo material she unearthed in dialogue with works of her own. Characterized by a subjective style of documentation, they portray with great empathy and occasionally ironic undertone the same people and sites. By juxtaposing historical and current pictures, Nimcova searches for traces of change and discovers a surprising continuity of everyday reality – as if time had stood still.

Using her hometown as an example, Nimcova creates a historical panorama and a time slice of the current post-Communist situation that sidesteps the frequently all-too-simple documentation of an »ex-Communist identity«. She causes a discourse to unfold in pictures, a discourse which puts collective and personal memories in a metonymic relation to one another and closely interweaves »identity« with the process of remembering.

As part of the exhibition, Nimcova will also present her new film project, for which she analysed banned films by Slovakian directors made between 1968 and 1989.

A joint project of the Bank Austria Kunstforum, Bank Austria and Kulturkontakt Austria.
A catalogue will be published to accompany the exhibition.

Curators:
Heike Eipeldauer (Bank Austria Kunstforum)
Annemarie Türk (Kulturkontakt Austria)

Link to Lucia Nimcova: www.luco.sk