Oskár Čepan

She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava, the Department of Intermedia and Multimedia under the direction of doc. Anna Daučíková, and from the Academy of Performing Arts, the Department of Animation. She obtained her doctoral degree from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design with the work focused on the topic of memories of the Jewish community in the form of hand-made animation. She participated in artist residencies in Romania, Slovenia, Austria, France, England and Mexico. Her works were shown at many collective and solo exhibitions in Slovakia and abroad (Behind the railings, Liptov Gallery of P.M.Bohúň, Liptovský Mikuláš, 2020; Maps of friendships, Altán Klamovka Gallery, Prague, 2019; Place of nearness, space of separation, Gallery Cabinet T, Zlín; Dancing on the ruins, Nová Cvernovka, Bratislava; Flora pondtemporary, St. Polten, Austria).

Statement

Discreetly ambitious projects of Daniela Krajčová make people participate in them in order to create experimental documentaries which use media, such as drawing and painting, together with animation and installation. Communities become active participants in the creative process and contextualization of the work. Slovak nurses working in Austria, immigrants, people affected by the memories of hardship in concentration camps—each of them tells his/her story. With casual, but rich means of expression, a spontaneous eye and lively lines, commenting on powerful biographical narratives, Krajčová’s harmonious painting form and social engagement became one indissoluble whole, making the accessibility a political value and including the testimony as a communal value.

Curatorial statement

The dominant point of departure of Daniela Krajčová’s (1983) oeuvre is undoubtedly the medium of drawing, which nevertheless plays, much as the rest of the means used by the artist, such as animation or video, a very specific social role. Krajčová has been dealing with critical situations of various social groups in her projects for a while now, recently concentrating on the group whose hardships she has been sharing, the situation of mothers. The role of mother in the sense of a full time job which the artists strives to reconcile with her artistic efforts is also a point of departure for a broader reflection involving the contemporary social context of motherhood and a number of problems that go with it. Drawing is usually considered an intimate medium of expression, in Daniela Krajčová’s works it nevertheless assumes dimensions that border on the monumental, along with an accentuation of their communicative potential. These involve series of drawing influenced by animation and based on the narrative expressiveness of the related experience of motherhood, as well as investigation of situations, elements, and spaces realized while taking her children out for a stroll in the neighborhood.

Viktor Čech