Daniela Krajčová: Maps of Friendship

An opening of the exhibition on Tuesday, March 5, 2019, from 6 p. m.
The exhibition until March 30, 2019

Accompanying program on Saturday, 30 March 2019
2:00 – 4:00 p.m. – animation workshop for children, 4:00 – 5:00 p.m. – commented viewing of the exhibition and the exhibition activity of Klamovka Pavilion.

curator: Lenka Sýkorová

Daniela Krajčová graduated from both the Academy of Fine Arts and the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava (the Department of Animation). Her artwork reflects social topics. For her, drawing is a natural medium to express ideas that she turns into drawn illustrations or animations. However, her artwork also shows overlaps into interactive installations and artistic participation. She considers drawing to be a visual medium that unites us all and through which we are able to grasp and express the societal development around us. Interest in an individual inside society, his fate and politico-social historical and topical contexts are very important for Daniela Krajčová. Drawing becomes her tool for criticizing the state of society. Drawing as a sketch, map, record or documentation thus represents a major part of her artwork.

In recent years, Daniela Krajčová has worked with the theme of migration through a direct interaction with immigrants living in Slovakia and includes them in the creative process. A geographical mapping of relationships is the first phase where immigrants draw a map of friends living in other regions while describing what unites them and where they met. After that, the author creates another drawing network that represents her own interpretation of the immigrants' stories and creates loosely stylized associations that illustrate their stories. Their narrations are transformed into drawn conversations and frozen into a static picture. The unstable form of the underlying white cotton fabric evokes the fragility of the stories of the selected segment of Slovak society. This highly participative project works with concrete people. It targets the humane context of the migration crisis through individual stories, while pointing out the ethnographic undertone of Europe's current situation under the pressure of co-habitation of different cultures. Daniela Krajčová's projects focus on the principles of humanism. Her interest in minorities (immigrants, Roma, Jews, etc.) opens up topical poignant issues through visual arts - drawing, animation, installation and painting.

Lenka Sýkorová