Come To Dust

#3 min Nadia Markiewicz, Barbora Bačová, Karina Golisová, Ines Karčáková, Oskar Helcel

12. 2. 2025

The exhibition Come To Dust presents the photographic work of five talents nominated in 2024 by Fotograf Zone for the prestigious European project FUTURES.

The exhibition project Come To Dust is based on a collaboration with the FUTURES platform. As a partner organization, we provide visibility to our talents that we promote through the exhibition. TALENTS are selected annually by the Fotograf Zone dramaturgical board based on their publication in the WANTED section of Fotograf Magazine,

The Fotograf Zone TALENTS selection presents some of the most compelling emerging artists from the Central European region. Each year, it highlights current social and cultural themes explored through photography.

The work of the exhibitors focuses on the fragility and temporality of moments that accompany us on the borders between worlds – the known and the unknown, the real and the imaginary. Through the installation, the viewer finds themselves in environments that cannot be easily named: a hospital as a space of transition, an unknown city full of strangers, a rocket research station or speculations about the afterlife. The themes of impermanence and the impossibility of grasping certain phenomena in words open up a space for thinking about the relationship of man to time, place and his own transcendence.

The exhibition presents five photographic series that touch on themes of temporality, alienation, and the feeling of ephemerality.

The exhibition presents five photographic collections that touch on the themes of temporality, alienation and the feeling of impermanence. Karina Golisová's project Like everyone else, I have to be somewhere too captures life in a close-knit community in a new city and explores feelings of loneliness and the search for personal space. In his Past Future series, Oskar Helcel photographs the Baikonur space complex and its specific atmosphere, where the weight of military propaganda is intertwined with Islamic and Kazakh culture. Barbora Bačová's series I am gonna live my life deals with the theme of serious illness in the family and approaches photography as a material form of self-therapy. Ines Karčáková´s project Flowers are giving up focuses on the feeling of alienation from nature and confusion, which reflects the failure of civilization in the context of the environmental crisis. Nadia Markiewicz's project Carolyn explores the themes of death and life after life. She captures objects of her close friend with funeral themes and sees the collection of objects as a way of preparing for the inevitable. In this way, each of the artists raises existential questions in their work and looks for ways to deal with the ambiguity of the contemporary world.

Text: Světlana Malina

Exhibiton: Come To Dust
Authors: Oskar Helcel, Barbora Bačová, Nadia Markiewicz, Ines Karčáková, Karina Golisová
Curator: Světlana Malina
21. 2. 2025 — 6. 3. 2025
Fotograf Gallery Zone

IMAGES CAPTIONS

Nadia Markiewicz

is visual artist, performer, author of installations and video art. PhD fellow at the Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow. Resident at the International Studio and Curatorial Program in New York City in 2023. MFA graduate of the Studio of Spatial Activities of prof. Mirosław Bałka at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw (2020). Also studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie (2010-11) in Amsterdam and during an internship at the Studio of Performance at FaVU VUT in Brno led by Julie Béna and Jakub Jansa (2021). Received the Europe Beyond Access award granted by Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw and British Council in 2021 and the Grand Prix at the 10th Biennale of Young Art Rybie Oko (Baltic Gallery of Contemporary Art in Słupsk, 2022). Presented her works and performances at, among others, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (2023), Kunsthalle Bratislava (2022), Galeria Miejska Arsenał in Poznań (2022), Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw (2021), Sto Lat Gallery in New York (2021).

Barbora Bačová

is a Slovak photographer, born on in Košice. She studied photography at the Ladislav Sutnar Faculty of Design and Art in University of West Bohemia in Pilsen. Her work is dominated by authentic recording of everyday situations with poetic-geometric narrative overlaps. The themes touch on temporality, imagination, fiction, and the search for new image contexts (re-evaluation of image). Informal documentary images are diversified with abstract or stylized „cut-outs“ of everyday colors". The conscious disruption of the timeline opens up the possibility of individual interpretation, which the viewer can understand as he or she wishes - without time constraints. Barbora in recent years is interested in the relationship between the static image and the moving image. Her inspiration often comes from eastern Slovakia, personal experience, the theme of growing up and aging, home, landscape, spending leisure time and health care. She has participated in group exhibition projects in France, Germany, Slovakia, Czech Republic and others. She participated in Pla(t)form 2020 in the Swiss Fotomuseum Winterthur, where she was selected along with 42 artists. Barbora Bačová currently lives and works in Košice.

Karina Golisová

works mainly with documentary photography. A significant aspect of her work is the concept of the chosen family, which she sees as a viable alternative to the traditional family model. Through her work, she explores how friendships and communities can serve as a powerful means of resilience in the current era of polycrises. A key element of her practice is photographic zines, which she perceives not only as artistic objects but also as an inclusive medium capable of reaching a wider audience beyond traditional galleries. Through zines, she works with the dramaturgy of images and the reinterpretation of existing material, creating new layers of meaning and closing various life chapters. She is active in the Slovak and Czech underground music scene, where she has been documenting events for years and also co-creating its visual identity. She is the author of many self-published photographic zines such as Utopia, Published, and Underground. Creating zines gives her the opportunity to reinterpret existing material and create a new full-fledged work with its own meaning. She received her bachelor's degree from the Department of Photography and New Media at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava. She also spent a semester in Finland at the Department of Documentary Photography in Lahti. She later completed her master's degree at FAMU in Prague and is currently pursuing a PhD at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava.

Ines Karčáková

is multimedia artist from Slovakia, based in Prague, Czech Republic. Her interest is in topics such as light, time, space, and disturbance of their mutual interrelationships. She reflects on the qualities of the medium of photography through video installations in the space, which are often covered by appropriated visual material, in the long term. She is primarily interested in the changing specificity of photography - its original uniqueness is rapidly changing and today we can speak of it in terms of instability, ambiguity and untrustworthiness. Recently, she has primarily focused on research in astrophotography, among on cosmic microwave background, or on the boundary between the rough telescope record and the aestheticized photography serving to popularize astronomy itself. Now, she is forming an arc over the schematic and romanticized visions of cosmic distances, coming back to much more terrestrial problems. Her current themes are the disbalance between the pace of technological development and its actual understanding, or the consequences of long-term neglect of environmental problems. She had several exhibitions in Slovakia, Czech Republic, but also abroad - for example in Budapest, New York or Düsseldorf.

Oskar Helcel

is an audiovisual artist, photographer and performer. He graduated from the Department of Photography at FAMU in Prague in the studios of Markéta Kinterová and Hynek Alt. He has had several solo and group exhibitions as within Other Visions at PAF – Festival of Film Animation and Contemporary Art in Olomouc Gallery XY, 2022; Glajcha, Josef Sudek Studio, 2022; Tekoucí Dům, Jelení Gallery, Prague, 2020; Argumented Reality, online exhibition within The National Film Archive, 2021; Houses of Culture (together with Martin Netočný), Centre for Contemporary Art Prague, 2019. Helcel received an honorable mention in the European art thesis competition START POINT Prize 2020. He is a co-founder and active member of the theatre group Akolektiv Helmut.