The bod.k7 gallery space in the centre of Nitra. (source: Henrich Mišovič)
A woman, hogtied on a dinner table while a disinterested girl sitting next to her eats a meal while looking at her phone. A man, his rear hanging out of his trousers, photographs a man and a woman, both wearing skirts, as they share an embrace in the wilderness. A bespectacled man scratches his head as he observes a woman in a black dress lounge on a naked, collared man as she reads a book with a pentagram on it.
These are just some of the paintings that have ignited Nitra’s second cultural furore in as many months.
The situation ended with a gallery pulling an exhibition following an online harassment campaign. The detractors deemed the artworks displayed as “perverse”, saying that the “artistic value [was] absolutely zero”, and that their placement in a public street during the busy Christmas period endangered children. The complainants even went as far as posting instructions to their followers for submitting criminal complaints to the prosecutor.
The exhibition was held in the cultural centre bod.k7, on Nitra’s Radlinského Street. Provocatively titled “Folk u all”, aimed to reflect on “the phenomenon of introducing Slovak folklore as an idealised, canonised form of artistic expression”. It featured the work of three Slovak artists; Anna Mária Beňová, Ivana Mojšová and Dominika Kováčiková.
What drew the ire of some Nitra residents was the somewhat explicit nature of some of the images, including depictions of nudity and sexuality, and their placement in the street-facing windows of a busy shopping street. In a fiery mass-email directed the gallery’s curator, Katarína Jankechová, as well as several other figures of Nitra’s cultural scene, an anonymous sender decried the painting’s depictions of “a man's bare ass, a boy in a skirt, sadism/violence on a table, two gay men having sex, fetishes and other perversions that threaten morality”.
