Group Therapy

Not just randomly in Pezinok-Cajla - a place with a strong association with psychiatry, the exhibition Group Therapy would like to capture the increasing anxiety and slippery feeling of happiness that is being addressed by more and more artists nowadays. At one place, in the charismatic premises of an old mill, we concentrate works reflecting that participative inversion and community ethos, as we have been experiencing them in art and art operation of the last decades.

The unhealthy, performance-oriented lifestyle of the society has been responded by slower, as if therapeutic or relaxation art themes and formats. Artists become curators - both in the artistic and psychiatric meaning; they become social and community workers.

Community shift in visual art - even in the local one - is a new experience. There have certainly occurred hotter themes also in art in the meantime - e.g. protest action format, ecologic topics and (anxiety from) climate crises, the Anthropocene phenomenon, the so-called precarity and related considerations on meaningfulness of a job, topically the Corona crisis… However, the community ethos, that imminently shared humaneness, has still been earnestly echoing in art practise.

The project of our exhibition, launched early this year, originally counted with a more contacting format. Apart from artefacts and various documentations from live actions, the display was supposed to be vibrant with live events throughout the whole year. Group Therapy was meant to be "warm", intensely contacting, full of reciprocity. It was expected to comprise of numerous workshops both for children and adults, or interest and processual group artistic activities - all led by the very artists or the mill animators. We wanted to cook together, dine, knit, make experimental embroidery, bake bread, learn or unlearn, simply be together and share the missing or cultivate the neglected community values through therapy (and) art.

But, the Corona virus has made the situation a bit more complicated. However, we have not resigned to the exhibition theme as an intersection of community experience and joy recipes, but the exhibition will be less open. We will be cautious, yet will not give up the need of group therapy and interpersonal artistic formats. Depending on the situation, we shall consider the degree of contacts of our projects. The display is going to have a more "gallery-like" look; later we may open it to more lively artistic forms, too.

Group Therapy presents up to 20 artists, the works of whose have a predominantly community character and not necessarily an "artefact" approach. The content or energy of their effect could be perceived as a certain form of endorphins production - sharing and creating good energy, mutual pleasing, cure, relax, pleasurable way to spend "here and now", simply a regenerating community experience, a mutually shared flow.

Exhibiting artists:

Martinka Bobrikova and Oscar de Carmen, Ľudmila Horňáková, Zuzana Janečková, Jana Kapelová, Barbora Kleinhamplová, Magdaléna Kuchtová, KundyCrew, Karol Pichler, Nóra Ružičková, Erik Sikora, Jakub Straka, Kateřina Šedá, Maja Štefančíková, Lenka Záhorková