The Slovak New Wave / The Slovak New Wave

The exhibition and publication project of the Czech and Slovak curators presents eight authors who have been working in Prague for a long time or who are directly connected with this environment: Rud Prekop, Vasil Stanek, Ton Stan, Martin Štrba, Miro Švolík, Kamil Varga, Petr Župník and the tragically deceased Jan Pavlík.

The group of "Slovak photographers living in Bohemia" or "Czech photographers of Slovak origin" is a kind of common cultural asset of both countries and an interesting phenomenon when examining the relations between Czech and Slovak photography. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Department of Photography at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague was the only university in Central Europe that taught photography.

It is surprising that the generation of the Slovak New Wave remained practically uncontaminated by the tradition of Czech photography and grew up as a unique solitary individual on the grounds of Prague's FAMU. Despite this, or perhaps precisely because it was not an organized group with a defined program, their relatively uniform visual language represented one of the first manifestations of photographic postmodernism in our country.

The aim of the curators was to explore the phenomenon of the Slovak New Wave and its origins with a time gap of almost three decades. The curators place particular emphasis on works that were not presented at all or only marginally at the time.