Milan Vagač, Natália Sýkorová, DISTANT, ENDLESS HUM at VUNU Bratislava, Bratislava

DISTANT, ENDLESS HUM by Milan Vagač and Natália Sýkorová, curated by Michal Stolárik, at VUNU Bratislava, Bratislava, 23/04–24/05/2025.

Exhibition text:
An omnipresent static bustle stretches through a fluid world where desires take root in synthetic bowels. We find ourselves in a space where cold trades places with warmth, tension gives way to calm, and the human exchanges roles with the technological – though it is there that it can pulse again, discovering new forms of sensibility, learning to survive, differently and more powerfully. This is a world that exists after, and yet before. Residual memory and a sense of the familiar call for tactile experience, but we choose to remain silent observers of the unfolding coexistence of new forms.

The human trace is fleeting, at best, or entirely erased, yet beneath the surface of technological processes, glimpses of sensory life persist—hidden, deep within. The project Distant, Endless Hum unites, for the first time, the works of Natalia Sýkorová and Milan Vagač in a dialogue. Divergent artistic approaches converge in the pursuit of hybrid situations, where we observe unfamiliar forms with uncertain functions. Both artists craft imaginative environments and speculative narratives that disrupt well embedded perceptions of reality and its interpretations. They evoke (in)human perspectives aligned with technological realms, synthetic materials, and alternative or futuristic visions. The objects and paintings—infused with abstract and geometric elements—speak a visual language that offers us a look at the autonomous mechanisms that reside between surface and space. Milan Vagač (b. 1987, lives and works in Prague) has been continuously working and developing his series Gizmo since 2022, which is close to the abstract versions of painting, design and modernist principles of repetition and variation of motifs. His original programme naturally oscillates between image, object and painterly installation, where modular compositions, imaginative details or internal interfaces of fictional mechanisms dominate. He imitates various inorganic materials or parts of devices with flat paintings and transports us to the environment of automotive design or retrofuturistic utopian models.

He creates convincing haptic illusions, characterized by an appealing sterility that is disrupted by soft forms and, currently, by glimpses into the bowels revealing the inner life of objects that could have been created by the synthesis of machine and body. Natália Sýkorová (b. 1998, lives and works in Prague) operates at the intersection of visual art, research, and performance, developing speculative strategies informed by technological and ecological deliberations.

Her dystopian installations foreground the chill and sharp edges of alluring, yet disquieting metal objects, embedded within modifiable ecosystems. Sýkorová engages with topics of climate crisis and survival, the entanglements of biological and technological processes, or with water systems as agents of action and autonomous infrastructure inflicting our bodies. Her new forms, inscribed with echoes of history and mythology somewhere in the background, open a space for equilibrium between human, machine, and nature.