Barbara Kapusta Futures, Kunsthalle Bratislava

About

Kunsthalle Bratislava is delighted to invite you to Barbara Kapusta’s first exhibition in Slovakia, entitled Futures. The exhibition addresses and freely maneuvers between various time-scapes, bringing generational lessons and experiences closer together, while at the same time directing their resonance into the potential of various futures. Barbara doesn’t stay only within the realm of describing the dire conditions of our current reality, but also implements the sprawling roots of contingencies that might lead us to a vast array of parallel outcomes. The one presented in the exhibition space “A Window” at Kunsthalle Bratislava is filled and guarded by the radiant presence of three Giants. Large scale aluminum cast sculptures give the impression of a broken boundary between the physical and digital reality. While the Giants themselves stay silent, the story of Futures is narrated by a voiceover and parallel sound design, spreading through the exhibition space in a multi-channeled soundtrack. 

The exhibition is accompanied by an online publication. It is the first in a series of new publishing programming (organised by Denisa Tomková, Curator of Editorial Programming), focusing on critical thinking in relation to the Kunsthalle’s exhibition program. Barbara Kapusta’s artistic practice addresses the circularity of humanity’s repeated mistakes. It focuses on traditional values, power relations, lost faith in utopias, and the artist’s hope for an improved, more equal social structure and amelioration emerging from the current climate crisis. This publication furthers Barbara’s urgent viewpoint by providing a larger theoretical discourse. The two selected essays by Sophie Lewis and Legacy Russell bring an important critical point of departure on how to think further about the issue of radical solidarity in the times of climate crisis and how to create empowerment through virtual and technological possibilities. Both essays are for the first time ever translated and published in the Slovak language.

Both essays provide a new feminist manifesto: Lewis’s essay Amniotechnics, excerpted from Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family (Verso Books, 2019), in the spirit of eco-revolutionary hydro-feminism, is based on the idea of surrogacy and radical kinship.  Russell’s contribution, as excerpted from the book Glitch Feminism (Verso Books, 2020) embraces the causality of “error” and proposes that it might be in fact rather a much-needed erratum. These essays are accompanied by the exhibition text written by the exhibition curator, Jen Kratochvil, and a poem written by the artist. Kapusta has designed a new font for her exhibition at Kunsthalle Bratislava in collaboration with the graphic designer Sabo Day. Futures is an alphabet of 26 characters that she uses in both her new video and her text piece shown on the pillars in front of Kunshalle spelling the title of the show.