Brussels, Strasbourg, Luxembourg
8 July 2016 - 18 September 2016
Searching for beauty (Hľadanie krásy) exhibition - official opening on 11 July / Brussels
The Searching for Beauty project has been created by artists Michaela Čopíková and Veronika Obertová who work under the Ové Pictures brand. The multimedia exhibition and website project has been created in cooperation with curator Mária Rišková and a team of other experts.
The project is aimed at defining our current understanding of beauty. It sends a message that visual culture is gradually incorporating images of a new country, such as urban still lives which do not depict an idealised city but rather work with the real environment in which people live and to which they are emotionally tied. Themes include, for example, a change of attitude to housing estates and a change in the way they are perceived aesthetically or the development of the relationship to the industrial heritage. The aim is to depict the newest themes and 'new beauty' (of Slovakia and other EU countries).
The authors have based their work on a favourite digital graphics format which makes it possible to easily create and share short animations composed of static images forming a time loop, known as a GIF.
The exhibition is composed of several interactive installations on the topic of searching for beauty, and uses the principle of animation. It also uses historical techniques of zoetrope and praxinoscope which were used to make optical illusions and which already have their contemporary variants (gifpop, giphoscope).
The second part of the project includes an online gallery of GIFs (website) which is accessible to contributors from Slovakia as well as from other EU countries. The international public can become co-authors of the project, creating and presenting their own small works on the topic of searching for beauty in the GIFs gallery at www.searchingforbeauty.eu.
The authors believe that themes created by the public will help us to understand what citizens of Slovakia and other countries deem to be beautiful. They also understand that the concept of 'beauty' is disputable and they are prepared for polemics.
The exhibition is organised by the Slovak Design Centre.
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