START POINT PRIZE – Prize for emerging artists

This graduate from the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava first studied photography (at the Department of Photography and New Media) and only later changed to a studio with a wider approach to media, +-XXI, under Daniel Fišer. In a series of photographs Kmeťová works with a pure, even minimalistic visual language. Each of her works is dominated by a strong theme which she interprets through a powerful artistic gesture. The motifs in her series are not created through the use of any constructed or complicated thematic approach, but rather through banal situations and realities, within which she finds a certain moment of surprise which makes them exceptional. She focuses in on it and interprets it for the viewer. In her thesis Home and/or Naive Melody she deals with the issues of memory. Through individual images she returns to highly ephemeral experiences from her past, from her childhood. Again, they are simple moments which do not usually appear in family photographs nor in other records. Her photographs and objects from her thesis invite the viewer to quietly participate through the awareness of experiencing similar banal moments, the shared realities of a distant personal past. As in other series by the artist these are short personal stories, “mostly nonsensical, intuitive, but also crucial for [my] search.” (lg)