Paula Gogola & Natália Sýkorová at Medium Gallery, Bratislava

Paula Gogola & Natália Sýkorová, Begone Estrone, Medium Gallery, Bratislava, July 23 – August 31, 2025, curated by Zuzana Jakalová, exhibition design by Adam Rýznar, graphic design by Prokhor Maserov, soundscape by Johannes Tröstler.

-n the bathroom, there is no lying. Not to the flesh, not to history.”
A fleeting thought as I stepped into Begone Estrone, as if my feet were crossing into a mechanical shrine, built not of faith, but of pipes and rust.-

What is a bathroom, really? A place for cleansing or exposure? A confessional or a lab? Begone Estrone, the joint exhibition by Paula Gogola and Natália Sýkorová at Bratislava’s Medium Gallery, opens like a question suspended in steam: what if intimacy was an industrial landscape? What if bodily care revealed itself as a surgical operation on the language of power?

The room is cold. Not just due to the dominance of metal and milky white surfaces, but because of that altered silence that hangs only in liminal places, waiting rooms, locker rooms. Johannes Tröstler’s ambient soundscape hums imperceptibly underfoot, a continuous tremor, almost pre-human. Adam Rýznar’s exhibition design is anything but neutral: it’s clinical, surgical, surveyed. The space asserts itself as a controlled organism, and yet, contaminated. Prokhor Maserov’s graphic design isn’t seen directly, but it’s felt in the quiet typographic austerity that threads through the show like an invisible signature.

Scattered across the gleaming floor, metallic plates and flat surfaces resemble discarded machine carcasses. Vertical wall elements evoke sacred silhouettes reduced to plumbing: twin installations with stainless steel hoses hanging down like mechanical limbs or instruments of futuristic ablution. The bathroom here is both simulacrum and threshold, sacred and profane cancel each other out in a glacial visual coherence. Each object, meaningless in isolation, becomes a vessel of meaning precisely because of its displacement.

The gesture is surgical even in the material choices: brushed steel, galvanized grids, mirrored-yet-matte surfaces, traces of use and abandonment. There are no bodies on display, and yet everything screams presence. The presence of someone who washed, medicated, hid, perhaps even transformed within these walls. The “feminine” is not iconographic here, but intrinsic, almost endocrine. The title itself, Begone Estrone, echoes an exorcistic injunction toward a female hormone: a tension that is both corporeal and ritual, medicinal and superstitious.

Gogola and Sýkorová do not illustrate the vulnerability of the female body, they stage it with an engineer’s precision and an archaeologist’s lucidity. Each element is an unfinished narrative fragment, a surgical object awaiting use or obsolescence. There is no nostalgia, no aestheticization of trauma, only a razor-sharp investigation into the invisible infrastructures of care, and the deeply political aesthetics they carry.