ENG

The Project Photoreport (2010) reflects my view through visual arts on extremism in society. Through two related collections of photographic outputs, work documents parallel of action vs. reaction. These take place at a specific location, situated near the town of my birth, in artificially created: Pantheon of Slovak personalities. This place can be called a showcase of Slovak folk nationalism. Every year there are organized public meetings and celebrations of the first Slovak Republic in the form of distorting the facts of World War II. Photoreport is its own probe – a sketch and also reaction to the topic of collective (national) identity-myth-trauma, as the current report of the home environment – the Slovak countryside. Through my physical participation in the celebration and also intervention in the form of versus reaction, I uncover previously unknown elements themselves of rural nationalism in our society firsthand.

Anabela Sládek

„The continuity of a critical reflection of the Slovak national identity, but also different mystification myths present in the works of the author has been confirmed in the action called Photoreport. As a young committed artist, Sládek was infiltrated into the anniversary celebrations of the Slovak State annually organized by the rightist-extremist association Sovak Revival Movement in the Pantheon of the Slovak national influencers in Čakajovce, a village close to Nitra. Her participation in the convention had the character of a subversive research. She documented the course of the event and placed black wreath to the memorial to symbolically remind of the killings and death. Through the action she drew the attention to the national awareness of the community within which there grows the rightist extremism, the collective memory is being rewritten, and Jozef Tiso is publicly hailed as the “hero” of the Slovak history. She ironized the Pantheon of the Slovak National Influencers calling it a “display cabinet of the Slovak popular nationalism”.“

Vrbanová Nina, A JE TU ZAS?/ LOOK WHAT IS BACK, Slovenský štát v súčasnom umení / The Slovak State in Contemporary Art, 2016 – 2017, Kunsthalle Bratislava, p. 104, ISBN 978 – 80 – 972754 – 0 – 2