In Slovakia, there is currently talk of state capture or direct attacks on our democracy. Day after day, we see the independence of the judiciary undermined, grants for human rights organizations canceled, the criminal law changed so as to protect the perpetrator and not the victim, the director of public television dismissed because, according to the leadership of the SNS (Slovak National Party), the national channel should be a state television and should be run by those in power. Against the backdrop of these and other horrific events, Kunsthalle Bratislava, where I have worked for more than two years and which is located almost exactly across the building of the Ministry of Culture, which we can see from the windows of our offices, is being closed down.
As I sit over this article, wondering if I should have agreed to write it at all, feeling repeatedly traumatized by the events of the past few weeks, I have to admit that I can only write it in a very personal way. This way, I can offer an insight into the workings of an (un)ordinary small public organization, that, until January 2024, functioned as the only state-funded exhibition space for contemporary art in Slovakia. It worked until Martina Šimkovičová, the star of the disinformation channel, TV Slovan, a homophobic extremist who was fired for hate speech by her former employer, the private TV Markiza, was appointed Minister of Culture of the Slovak Republic in the wake of the 2023 parliamentary elections.
When we saw the results, we immediately knew there would be tectonic movements in state-run institutions. However, the speed and manner in which this warrior of “pure Slovak culture” began to plunder the sector and poison all the wells shocked even the most hardened cultural activists.
The Fight for Kunsthalle Bratislava has Been Ongoing for a While
The struggle for the Kunsthalle has a long history and has been partly fought by the artistic community, which was instrumental in its creation. Although it was established belatedly and was, I should say, a bit of an “institutional patchwork,” it did come into being in 2014.
It is located in building of the House of Arts in the city center, an office building that is also home to the National Enlightenment Centre (NOC) and the Slovak Literary Centre (SLC). In the beginning, Kunsthalle Bratislava was not completely independent, and for the first two years it was a subsidiary of the NOC, which I can barely imagine because I see these two institutions as being from two different galaxies. From 2016, it was part of the Slovak National Gallery, until it became independent in 2020, as an organization overseen by the Ministry of Culture of the Slovak Republic, just like the NOC, the SLC, the Slovak National Gallery (SNG), and 26 other organizations.
It is often the case with galleries and cultural organizations that their artistic programs bear the stamp of their directors’ personalities. With the arrival of Jen Kratochvil, a lot of things changed at the Kunsthalle. A curator and critic of contemporary art who has worked in Vienna (Art Space Significant Other) and Prague (Galerie Rudolfinum), Kratochvil is a lecturer at FAMU in Prague and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava (AFAD). He took his position on February 1, 2021, after a due selection process. Coming from an independent, as well as academic, background, it took him some time to get to grips with the position and put together a team that enabled him to navigate the Slovak state administration.
Under his leadership, Kunsthalle Bratislava has hosted numerous exhibitions, a public program and various performances, including contemporary dance and experimental music. His team’s vision was to create a community space in the city center—a safe space where contemporary art could be seen, but also where one could just hang out. Jen Kratochvil worked his way through the program, staff and visual identity of the whole organization, and together we were going to improve Kunsthalle’s operating principles. He may have been a thorn in other people’s sides— but I don’t know why. To my mind, he made serious efforts to bring to Bratislava such works that respond to pressing local and global issues, to contextualize them, and to try to transcend the limitations of what is a peripheral gallery in a global context.
As we worked on several shows, our team bonded and learned to collaborate. Though culture-related public sector jobs are low-paid and precarious, and work outside hours goes unremunerated, we found motivation in each other and in the content of our program. At one time or another, every one of us felt pushed to the edge and become impatient. Shows and events in contemporary art have their own special needs, which the founder often fails to grasp. Before the elections, I was of the belief that improving communication between the founder and its organizations would help us to improve the system that did not quite understand how contemporary art worked. We never had the opportunity to prove it.
I see Jen as someone who seems to find a way to motivate interesting people to stick together. I was fairly proud of the way we operated—of our breaking the narrative of an old-school civil service tied up by rules and bureaucracy and unable to respond to the needs of contemporary art. It felt as if we were beginning to figure out a way of doing things, though we of course faced a lot of problems. We could have written a complete case study of the last two years, something on the theme of “Compliance with the law and rules in a state-funded organization vs. projects in contemporary art.”
In spite of the growing social crisis, Kunsthalle Bratislava worked and functioned well. It collaborated with Kunsthalle Wien on an exhibition curated by Laura Amann and Aziza Harmel and entitled Do Nothing, Feel Everything, on a solo exhibition by Paul Maheke, You and I, which was later taken over by the Galerie Rudolfinum in Prague, and has other successful projects to its credit. In 2023 we presented Deeper Green, the solo exhibition of the widely renowned Magali Reus, and Edible, Beautiful, Untamed, the solo show of Anna Hulačová.A Plant, a year-long program by curator Lýdia Pribišová, had a unique place in the programming, taking place in public spaces and outdoor locations, addressing the theme of the connection between contemporary art and our environment.
There were some big names among the curators, exhibiting artists and collaborators of the Kunsthalle, whose days are now counted, including Selma Selman, Inga Lace, Nicole L’Huillier, Egle Oddo, Ján Durina, Denis Kozerawski, Paula Gogola, Ursula Mayer, Katrina Daschner, András Cséfalvay, Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Isadora Neves Marques, Tony Cokes and Ben Rivers.
With the arrival of Denisa Tomková, an academic and a teacher at the Faculty of Humanities of Prague’s Charles University, the publishing activities of the Kunsthalle also received a boost. Tomková started to release essays by contemporary artists on a regular basis, which publications I consider matchless in Slovakia, save, perhaps, for the book edition of the magazine Kapitál. The culmination of her time at the Kunsthalle was the book, Wandering Concepts. All the publications can be downloaded in English as well. Do so, while it is still possible. We really don’t know when the “book burning” era will start in Slovakia.
The Beginning of the End
When the Kunsthalle Bratislava team returned to work after the winter holidays, the first thing we were told was that the director was resigning. He apologized for not wanting to lead the fight against the system—one that currently cheers on hate towards LGBTIQ+ people, encourages conspiracy theories, and which prompts the ministry to distinguish its own institutions into those that are necessary and those that are not. All these decisions are underpinned by nothing more than vicious rants from the Minister herself. The director of Kunsthalle Bratislava, Jen Kratochvil, asked the Minister of Culture to relieve him of his position, as of January 15, 2024, on the grounds that he wanted to devote more time to his curatorial and pedagogical practice. It was more than obvious that this move was not voluntary, and suddenly it was clear to everyone that heads, and even entire institutions, were about to fall, as well as that 2024 would be a year of political and ideological purges in the culture of Slovakia.
Since September, a pro-Kremlin, scary disinfo squad backed by Fico (the current PM of Slovakia—Ed.) has been on the rampage at the Ministry of Culture, at best spreading sinister conspiracy theories on disinformation websites and social networks, and at worse firing people, canceling grants for projects on media literacy and the fight against hoaxes among young people, lifting the embargo on cultural cooperation with Russia and Belarus, lying, misleading and trying to change the law regarding the Art Council Fund and the whole Audiovisual Fund of Slovakia.
After the director was relieved from his post, Kunsthalle still had a zero-based budget for its program, which was prepared by a team of internal and external curators. The 2024 program was about working with artists like Valentýna Janů, the winner of the Jindřich Chalupecký Prize, who was already preparing her first solo exhibition for Kunsthalle Bratislava when we informed her that the event would be canceled. On 14 February, Valentine’s evening, we officially ended Kunsthalle’s program with her performance, entitled Snap. Other names from the contemporary art field that were part of the program for 2024 included Maxine Vajd, Inside Job (a Polish artist duo, Ula Lucińska and Michał Knychaus), and Penthouss. As part of the planned exhibition, Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed and Something Blue, a collaboration with artists Ján Ďurina, Ondřej Houšťava, Adam Poljak and Anna Chrtková had been confirmed. It was to be an international traveling exhibition that was meant to address the historical traumas and feelings of helplessness of young people after the murders in Slovakia of Jan Kuciak and Martina Kušnírová, and Matúš Horváth and Juraj Vankulič. In the summer of 2024 there was supposed to be an international group exhibition with a feminist viewpoint on outer space and earthly landscapes, curated by Jelisaveta Rapaić and featuring the work of prominent local and foreign artists. Artist Lucia Tkáčová and curator Lýdia Pribišová prepared an art project for the hospital near the Kunsthalle, called Palliative Turnover and Bed Linen. Its concern is the negative impact of the hospital environment on the psyche, and in this context they jointly prepared neuro-healing, aesthetically and neuro-somatically stimulating sheets for hospital beds.
The interim director, our former finances director, Denisa Zlatá, was immediately invited by the Secretary of State to present the program for 2024. Funding for the program was rejected that day, right on the spot. Although there is no official proof, it is very obvious what triggers them. In their opinion, the LGBTIQ+ and “gender agenda threatens the future of our children,” contemporary art in the Kunsthalle’s interpretation is immoral, and the rainbow flag has no business hanging over the entrance of a national institution.
I am almost certain that, although no one from the current Ministry of Culture has seen any of Kunsthalle’s exhibitions, read our books or know the artists, they still can’t stand us. They are convinced that this is something that bothers them, and goes against their idea of “nice,” “proper” and “obedient” art.
We are currently living a reality in which the person officially responsible for the ministry of culture is openly denigrating the work of Andrej Dúbravský and posting polls on Facebook where people can decide what they want their taxes to finance: the repair of monuments, castles, or gay pride parades where “people dress up as the opposite sex, and show it all to children.” She has also been deleting her social media posts and pretending that her account has been hacked.
At the beginning of the year, the current ministerial force also proposed an amendment to the law about museums and galleries. It could result in the summary dismissal of directors not only by the Minister of Culture, but also by people in charge of self-governing regions or towns and municipalities. (The Council of Galleries of Slovakia also reacted to this with an open letter to the MPs of the National Assembly of the Slovak Republic and the Minister of Culture.) If this is approved, they can immediately terminate the contracts of the inconvenient artistic leaders of cultural organizations without any explanation. Those who do not submit to their preferences and support their insane misrule will need to step down and they will not have to explain anything to anyone. I often think of Hungary in this context. We read with horror about e.g. the abolition of gender studies and similar cases of Orbán’s attacks on the non-governmental sector. In an interview with the Czech magazine, A2 alarm, Jen Kratochvil said: “what took Orbán a decade to do in Hungary, Fico and his people want to do in a few months here.”
The Ministry of Culture of the Slovak Republic officially explained its decision by the fact that Kunsthalle Bratislava “did not take advantage of its historic chance, both in terms of its program content, public expectations and the efficiency of its management.”
They claimed the Kunsthalle was not going to be closed down, but only moved under the Slovak National Gallery. “In this organizational change, the Ministry of Culture will fully support all steps taken by the management of the Slovak National Gallery in relation to the Kunsthalle and its integration into its structures,” the Ministry says.
Director General of the Slovak National Gallery Comes to “Rescue” Kunsthalle Again
Alexandra Kusá has been Director General of the National Gallery since 2010, and my perception of the effects of her tenure has been, I would say, neutral. Last year, after many years, the renewed and renovated premises of the Slovak National Gallery, in which the state invested millions, were finally opened.
Slovak documentary filmmakers Lena Kušnieriková and Jana Durajová made a documentary about the renovation process, Hanging Without Walls, which premiered in December 2023 and had taken ten years to complete. It is about how extremely difficult it was for all of us to fight for a magnificent and imposing building, representative spaces on the bank of the Danube, and how politicized the process was. The trailer already gave me a pang in the heart, with Director Kusá walking through the ruined space that awaited reconstruction and much needed funds and says something like, “Maybe if I cried my heart out in front of the Minister of Culture…”
This sentence stuck with me and was one of the first to come to mind when I myself was “crying my heart out” as I was reading the SNG’s statement about their taking over the Kunsthalle Bratislava, without any resistance to the extremist Minister of Culture, as if the precedent meant nothing. Moving on. Let’s go. I didn’t know how all this was going to develop. Later in the film, we can see a tender scene where the director is crying in a perfectly normal human way and says that she is beginning to feel that she is fighting for a cursed building. I too have cried several times since January, feeling that while I do believe in curses, in this case I know we are fighting plain hypocrisy and demagogy.
After the Ministry of Culture openly started to destroy free culture in Slovakia at the beginning of the year, a new platform, Open Culture! (OK!) was created, which, together with theAcademy of Fine Arts (AFAD),staged a discussion on the future of the Kunsthalle, where representative of the Ministry of Culture, Peter Lukáč, and the Director General of the Slovak National Gallery, Alexandra Kusá, were among those invited to talk.
Alongside other activities, OK!initiated a call for the resignation of M. Šimkovičová from her position as minister, which was signed by more than 188,000 people, making it the largest online petition in Slovakia to date.
During this important and only public discussion, SNG director Kusá said that she was traumatized by the fact that the Kunsthalle was again going to be saved by them (SNG).
At that moment, most of Kunsthalle’s employees, who since January had not known what would happen to their jobs, were sitting in the auditorium. During the discussion, Denisa Zlatá, Kunsthalle’s interim director, and Lýdia Pribišová, its curator, tried to raise the question of the future, as they wanted to find out what would happen to the space, the finances and the people who actually “are Kunsthalle” at the moment. We received an answer only the next day, in the form of a simple official email, which informed us that our organization would be managed by the SNG from April 1, no staff contracts will be made, and we would all lose our jobs almost immediately. We had a month. Quite traumatic, isn’t it?
Abolition is the New Demolition
In the statements of the Ministry of Culture of the Slovak Republic and the Slovak National Gallery, there were accusations of mismanagement on our part. Of course, every institution, irrespective of its size and expertise, will make mistakes. Kunsthalle underwent a proper internal audit, which revealed a number of administrative errors. Errors that were duly corrected, with the audit completed on January 31—while we had been refused funding on January 16.
Why are we not talking openly about Kunsthalle being censored and canceled because of sick ideological developments at the Ministry? Why are we hiding the truth, diplomatically? The narrative that is circulated is that the institution is in chaos, economic misconduct happened and the employees who have so far upheld this organization with their commitment are suddenly at fault and should be dismissed.
I am sincerely sorry that neither Mrs. Kusá from her position, nor anyone from the SNG stood up for their colleagues from the Kunsthalle, and that with all their actions of approval they helped the Ministry of Culture to implement the plan to actually close down Kunsthalle Bratislava. We will probably never know who made the decision about the fate of a whole team of professionals and sent them packing. The official communication is that all this serves “process optimization,” but let us remind ourselves that we were the ones to hang rainbow flags on the building. And that is not very optimal in Slovakia nowadays.
Micro Resistance is Important
It is difficult to cope with the occurrences, to extract what is essential from them, to see what is related to what and how the individual events are connected. This is just the fate of one public organization which, in my opinion, has outdone itself, its capabilities—in terms of both personnel and finances—with its program over the last two years. It was able to raise extra funds via various grants, to increase attendance and interest in contemporary art in various age groups, to attract new people to Bratislava from Vienna or Prague, and once made the mistake of paying an extra 315 euros to a temporary worker due to an incorrect time sheet. A common mistake, absurdly overblown. We had big plans, to develop external curatorial collaborations with the local scene, to further develop neighborly relations with Vienna and Budapest—in short, to create a new map of collaborations within the region. We brought to Bratislava big names of the global art scene and addressed such topics as feminism, environmental crisis, queer issues, and the themes of decolonization, mental health and fragile emotional well-being in contemporary art —subjects that Slovak society so badly needs to understand.
In a normal world, such an institution would deserve an increase in funding and staff, a chance to develop further. The indication it should receive from its founder is that it matters. It should receive support in the form of respect from the SNG—our older big sister. Instead, it is being shamefully abolished, though it is called a merger.
Kunsthalle Bratislava has become an example for the entire department of culture. What will happen to other institutions if they do not clean up their act? What will come if they don’t keep quiet and swim with the current? Audits? Internal controls? Some other type of administrative bullying? There are many possibilities, but if the aforementioned acct on museums and galleries is passed, there will simply be a change to a leadership that will be beholden to the current powers that be, while those who disagree can leave, be without jobs and opportunities.
It was only in retrospect that I realized the most cynical aspect of this story, when I learned that we were all losing our jobs and Kunsthalle was over, for now. It is something the director of the SNG during the public debate, at AFAD: “That’s football, that’s what the game is like.”
The last exhibition we did as a team was a solo show called Micro Resistance, by the Lebanese-born artist Marwa Arsanios, and the curatorial text starts like this: “What is the smallest force of resistance, and how does it contribute to the broader fight against oppression? How do we form and define resistance, and how precisely should we know our opponents?”
In the midst of the current social storm, this is not the only country where dystopian books and films are becoming reality. I find it very important to stand on the right side of history, or, to “play for the right team.” Even if that is the smallest of struggles and it is the right side of the history of one young cultural organization, where many visitors and artists found catharsis, asylum and safe sanctuary.
I don’t play football any other way.
Martina Kotláriková is a professional cultural manager, who is based in the production of cultural events. She has been working in the music industry since 2016, runs the international festival of contemporary dance Nu dance fest and she was the head of the production team of Kunsthalle Bratislava.
Cover image: RIP Kunsthalle. Funeral performance, March 27, 2024. Photo: Eliška Šufliarska
