East Contemporary

Danubiana Meulensteen Art Museum: Permanent Collection + “Crossing Borders” (Grüner Collection) + Orit Hofshi „Crossing“ + Augustin/Peteraj

Bratislava, April 2017, http://www.danubiana.sk/en Danubiana is a huge private museum located at the outskirts of Bratislava on an island in the middle of the river Danube. Gerard Meulensteen, the owner of the museum is the founder of Neways Electronics International, a global electronic manufacturing services provider from the Netherlands with subsidiaries in Germany, East-Europe and…

Umelka Gallery: Maria Machatova “Landing” + Valeria Zacharova “Stopy Civilizacie”

Bratislava, April 4 – 16, 2017, http://www.svu.sk The Umelka Gallery is managed by the Slovak Union of Visual Artists (SVU). The building was purpose-built in the 1920s for the union, and it is a beautiful classic exhibition space, with roof windows spreading even light through the space. The two rooms of the gallery contained two…

Slovak National Gallery: Milan Adamciak “Adamciak, Begin!”

Bratislava, March 24 – June 4, 2017, http://www.sng.sk Simply speaking, Milan Adamciak is the Slovak John Cage. This was the main message the exhibition conveyed. The retrospective exhibition exhaustively covered the creations of Adamciak from 1964 to 2017. The majority of works was in the form of notations, sketches and visual poems on paper. There…

Slovak National Gallery: “Impermanent Exhibition” + Jan Zelinka “Intervention”

Bratislava, November 2, 2016 – May 21, 2017, http://www.sng.sk The space was dark, the exhibition design was fresh and contemporary. The combination of gothic to baroque religious paintings and sculptures with Zelinka’s dead animal sculptures was special. It made Zelinka steal the show. The contemplative approach to looking at religious paintings was somehow disturbed by…

DOX Centre for Contemporary Art: “Airship Gulliver” + “Architecture of the VII Day” + “Material 307”

Prague, March 17 – May 22, 2017 (VII Day), February 10 – May 8, 2017 (307), http://www.dox.cz/en/ I stopped by in DOX more by coincidence than plan. The largest exhibition space was closed in preparation of the upcoming (and now already opened) Big Bang Data show. Nevertheless, there was still enough to see and enjoy.

Tracing Spaces: Guided Tour through Nordwestbahnhof

Vienna, 12:00-15:00, March 17, 2017, http://tracingspaces.net The Tracing Spaces project is investigating the urban fabric of an old freight train station (Nordwestbahnhof in Vienna) that is going to be closed down in the near future. The project falls into an area between site specific art, anthropology and urban architecture research. The initiators of the Tracing…

MUMOK: Jakob Lena Knebl and mumok collection “Oh …” + Hannah Black “Small Room” + Július Koller “One Man Anti Show”

Vienna, November 25, 2016 – April 17, 2017 (Koller), March 17 – June 18, 2017 (Black), March 17 – October 22, 2017 (Knebl), http://www.mumok.at Attending the opening of the “Oh..” show was well worth it. It was astonishing to what lengths a museum can go in attempting to attract audiences, especially the younger generations. The…