Systems, Individuals and Measuring Tools

In her first solo exhibition in Spain Petra Feriancová seeks to make us part of her idiosyncratic understanding of Art and, as a consequence, of the World.

From the conjunction of the archive with post-production processes, her artistic practice revolves around material things that survive (us). Through a horizontal presentation, non-hierarchized, in which final pieces are presented with equal importance as the documentation process, the works of Petra Feriancová are more than objects-witnesses of an immediate past that, once rehabilitated and released from any trace of obsolescence or uselessness, get unmasked as relics, the sole function of which is none other than survival. From that, from this re-signification of her own, Feriancová deals with one of the biggest dilemmas of Man as an individual, but also as a species: the no longer problematic relation between the Self and the Other, but between the single and the multiple. Or what is the same: the relation between systems and individuals.

In Systems, Individuals and Measuring Tools - the site-specific installation born from the physical meeting between Petra Feriancová and the Chapel of St. Nicolau - the artist brings this exercise of World's synthesis and re-organization that defines her artistic practice a step further, introducing another (old) factor: art as the measure of life. Each one of the pieces contained in the Chapel works both as a measuring tool or as a temporal axis. Frequently, in consonance with the polarity challenge that is inherent to her, each work contains in itself this double function. To this first regard, which works in a completely autonomous way, another is added, born out of the outcome of relating a particular work both as the rest that accompanies it and as the building; the traditional assimilation of this with the celestial order is the reason for being the centerpiece of the work: the Solar System. Like this Feriancová has, once again, made clear the ambivalent relationship between the individual and the group - homogeneous or heterogeneous - demonstrating that often individual entity also has an own internal structure; that, mostly, the sense of that individual entity is enriched, or complemented, by being put in (the right) relation with the rest of the structure, as is evidenced by the presence of a Rossette that can only can be understood when observed from the right angle. Or that, in any case, the boundaries between the self and the other, the present and the past, the individual or a group, are never presented as separated entities, as it reminds the inscription of different collector coins in an old strain, the dating of which reveals the true age of the tree.

Petra Feriancová was born in 1977 in Bratislava, where she lives and works. In 2010, she was awarded the Oskar Čepan Prize for young visual artists organized by the FCS Foundation for a Civil Society. She has had solo exhibitions at Museum MAN, (Nuoro, 2016), Fondazione Morra Greco, (Naples, 2014), ISCP, International studio & curatorial program (New York, 2011), House of Arts Brno (2012), Slovak National Gallery (Bratislava, 2011), Moravian Gallery (Brno, 2008). Her work has also been featured in many group exhibitions. At BWA (Wroclaw, 2011), Sztuki Museum Łódź,(2011), Vienna Secession (Vienna, 2010), Museum of Modern Art of Saint-Etienne (2008) and many others. In 2013 Petra Feriancová represented the Czech and Slovak Republic at 55th Venice Biennial with the project "Still the Same Place".