BRATISLAVA.- Jana Želibská’s solo exhibition The World. Despair – Hope interprets the world in three images as a disturbed yet creative field of the present. The artist develops her visual language of sensuality, affective intensity, symbolic condensation, and ironic short-circuit. She presents the world as irritable. She articulates despair and hope as two affective poles of a shared reality.

Since the second half of the 1960s, Jana Želibská has been one of the decisive figures of the Central European neo-avant-garde. From her first solo exhibition, Possibility of Discovery (1967), she has created situations that transform the conditions of reception, introducing a new regime of seeing and a different quality of spectatorship. It is in this sense that Želibská’s work can be read within the broader genealogy of the feminist (neo-)avant-garde. Over the long term, she has devoted herself to cultivating sensibility through shock and to the gradual modelling of female consciousness in public space. Affect is a crucial dimension of her poetics. As Susan Best reminds us, art history has long named artistic tendencies and movements, formal innovations, and cultural meanings, yet has not focused on how works of art engage the senses, corporeality, and viewers' sensitivity. Jana Želibská does not tie meaning strictly to iconographic elements or to a lexicon of symbols, although she willingly employs and cites them. She is equally interested in the movement of bodies through space, the rhythm of looking, light, surfaces, and the agency of different materials.

The current exhibition continues a longer arc in the artist’s work with time as a theme and with motifs of transformation. The intermedia installation Swan Song Now at the Venice Biennale in 2017 translated the artist’s personal apocalyptic poetics into a transcendental image of the swan’s final song, expressing solitude as a quality of an ageing world. At the same time, it also addressed youth and its alarming desire for a stolen, already consumed future against the backdrop of environmental catastrophe. It worked with temporality as a form of duration on the edge, intensifying presence precisely at the moment of transformation. The World. Despair – Hope develops this energy in an even sharper social register. The exhibition brings into view an image of the world after rupture, interruption, and the erosion of trust in society and in its future.

At the same time, it emphasizes the strength of hope in persistence, cultivation, growth, and insists on the value of survival itself.

Excrept from the text of Lucia Gregorová Stach

Art historian and curator, currently working at the Slovak Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Arts in Banská Bystrica