3 seconds and 400 milliseconds (what you want) by François Bucher is a project that captures an instant snap-shot of contemporary society by means of freezing the endless flow of word-searches in a pier-to-pier (P2P) online network. The random list of words, adhered with silver vinyl lettering onto the glass windows or the walls of the gallery acts as a kind of measure, a live reading of 21st Century global culture and its turbulent, rapid, multifaceted desire.
The list of words can physicallycover any area size depending on the duration ofthe capture, the title of each new version of theproject will always contain this temporal reference as well as a reference to the site where the capture took place.
François Bucher was born in Cali, Columbia and lives between Berlin and New York.

Alan Bruton, "mirrors": arches"

Mirrors: Arches explores the construction of cultural identity by setting up a situation wherein one can observe oneself in other cultural frameworks.
Specifically, the project looks at the development of the structural form of the arch, a basic a shared human technology, as reduced into motifs of separate cultural identity.
The project catalogs a formal and chronological taxonomy of arches, and then represents this collection in a non-architectural scale and context as a set of framed mirror.
This demonstrates the ultimate superficiality of such identity constructions, and something of our deeper shared cultural connectedness.

An Original By Sacco & Vanzetti, A project by Christian Tomaszewski & Joanna Malinowska 2006
This new Window sticker project features the latest Prada collection photographed by the artists in a New York department store. These photographs were taken despite a regulation prohibiting this. In the sticker version , the artists have exchanged th Prada brand name with Sacco & Venzetti.
The basic idea is to bring a New York Prada store to Bratislava in the same way as fragments of European Medieval churches are reconstructed inside the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The "fetishising" of designer labels exists in the former Eastern block, but then there a lot differences. In the West, it is more about decadence and redundancy.
In the East, it still seems to have a taste of the different, better world that is only accessible to the few and special. In the former Eastern block, it also seems that the issue of authenticity is taken even more seriously.
Christian Tomaszewski has invited Joanna Malinowska to make an intrusion inside the department store by inserting clothes carrying the label: "an original made by Sacco & Vanzetti" a referring the the famous Marxist icons. All the Prada labels that are visible on the stickers have been replaced with the new labels
Christian Tomaszewski & Joanna Malinowska 2006

Anca Ignatescu : The ultimate progress

Cobalt 60
At the beginning of the 80's, a specialized branch of "Securitatea" together with some scientists developed a crazy experiment by injecting the trees, in a forest outside of Bucharest, with Cobalt 60, a chemical element used in nuclear power plants. The result of this experiment was that the trees grew up in a monstrous way.
The secondary "result" was that some children which played in that unmarked area have been irradiated and ultimately they died.
Ironically in 2007 Romania wants to become the main producer of Cobalt 60 in the European Community.

The ultimate progress
Ceausescu's "dream" was to transform Romania from an agrarian country to an industrial one.
He called that: "the new era of progress" and he sacrificed everything in order to complete his vision.
His obsession was to build everything on a monumental scale; thermal power stations that "could rich the sky" covering the electrical need of half of the country, enormous factory to produce heavy machines…
All this finished and unfinished "projects" ended up in a disaster for Romania; numerous species of small animals were extinct.
All this "achievements" were in the name of an absurd and impossible progress.

Adam Vackar , "Parallax View"

Adam Vackar (Czech Republic) presents edition of printed works for gandy gallery as a part of project "3 WINDOWS 4U". In his work, Adam Vackar is on continuous research of relation of the artist towards the society. In his project for gandy gallery, Vackar is questioning the presence of economic values in contemporary art. Using title similar to "The Parallax View", recent book of slovenian sociologist and philosopher Slavoj Zizek, Vackar stages confrontations between idealist and materialist understandings of various aspects of ontology, through confrontation between idealism and materialism expressed in Lacanian terms between an idealism's purported ability to theorize the All versus a Materialism's understanding that an apparent All is really a non-All.

Angelika Krinzinger, "UNA"

Eternally Fleeting Creatures


Every bit of matter can be conceived as a garden full of plants or a pond full of fish. But each branch of the plant, each member of the animal, each drop of its bodily fluids, is also such a garden or such a pond. And though the earth and the air between the plants of the garden or the water between the fish and the pond are certainly neither plant nor fish, they contain yet more of them, though mostly of a minuteness imperceptible to us.

G.W. Leibniz

Angelika Krinzinger's photographs explore the virtual abundance of sensation. The animals — her new pictures show enlarged details of different animal's bodies — are close enough to be touched. Through the close-up perspective, our eyes gain a haptic function in addition to their usual optical one. It is impossible to step back as we are right in the middle of the image. Already her series Gladiatoren (details from gladiator's skulls dating from Roman times) and the series Leaves (photograms of dried plants from a herbarium) deal with relics not as lifeless symbols or signs which merely exist as a reference to something from the past; with this process, she reintroduces relics into the process of life, into time again passing by, celebrating these relics as immediate entities which do not stand apart from their roll as intermediary. In this respect, her new series does not examine animals as representatives of a certain genus, species or breed, but rather she examines each animal as something singular with its own particular habits and behavior. These habits unfold in the "still" events which occur without notice, remaining almost unheeded in our everyday actions and perceptions. Krinzinger shows us the still life that continually flows amidst the noise of everyday life. In order to capture this, one must lose oneself in the object; one must live with these animals trying to find out what drives them to continue on and what limits them. Maintaining a distance, for the artist, also means losing the particular, as we only grasp the particular in the context of concrete experiences and specific occurrences. Losing oneself in things, in these living beings, can also mean no longer knowing whether or not it is a matter of a dog or a cat — but this anyway, as Krinzinger often emphasizes, is unimportant. The viewer does not have to be able to distinguish which living being (what kind of animal) is under consideration, a living being does not have to conform to the image we already have of it. It is not a question of showing what dogs are really like. She does not differentiate between animals, humans and things using the anatomical differences found in biology, which sum up and hierarchically organize living beings into groups using predetermined characteristics. The body always remains including everything that it is capable of: this body as part of a fleeting occurrence out of which the artist extracts the singular. Such an occurrence is comprised of different bodies such as a pair of whiskers, a draft of air — some noises? — "What has got into you?" — It is a question of the singularity of an individual expression, of the virtual connections between heterogeneous elements, of the potential inherent to a situation: The wind shifts a hair. As images of such events, the photographs are not excerpts, as they express a totality, even if there is always a more comprehensive totality. As such they do not imply anything that would first need to be completed as every detail is in itself a totality.

Mathias Schönher

Translation: David Quigley

Modified translation after: Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, Monadology, (trans.) Nicolas Rescher, Routledge, London, 1992, pg.26

each photography 90x120cm, edition 3, 2007

Zsoka Ath

In an era devoid of universal norms, imperatives and disciplines, everything becomes questionable. Words tend to replace each other "horror turning into beauty, good into evil, and truth into lie. And vice versa. We still have (and continue to cling to) our points of view and viewpoints, yet the truth "turned 'nomadic'" now clearly escapes our grasp. Or rather: while being in everyone's possession, it belongs to no one. "This is the way I see it, this is the truth"" so we say. Yet, each of us is familiar with the eery experience of facts suddenly metamorphosing into lies from one day to the other. Viewpoints and points of view shift with the passing tides. And yet the question remains: is it the things or we that move?
This is the question Zsóka Áth's work brings to the fore.

Perspective has, since the Renaissance, occupied a privileged place in Western episteme. It is the point on which all parallels converge and yet never reach. What is this point and what/who might be there to occupy it? Is it the place wherefrom God contemplates the world? Or the Vanishing Point where life histories running parallel to each other finally meet? Does this Point exist at all, or is it rather the projection of our dreams, desires, and imagination? Art is capable of rendering tangible the otherwise indiscernible. On a perspectival painting one does not doubt the existence of the Vanishing Point. It has its place on the canvas; in fact, the painting loses its interpretability without it. This point is determined by the position (viewpoint) of the artist and gives rise to the picture "the new reality which it enables us to discern and immerse ourselves into. Can any Reality exist without such a Point? Is it possible to forge a representation of any object without pre-determining the intersection of all parallels? Zsóka Áth's work raises more questions than the few I have hinted at here. I urge the spectator to immerse herself in the pillars of the bridge-cathedral" in search of the lurking Vanishing Point.

András B. Szilágyi

Juraj Tesàk "Petrzalka City"

This project was developing gradually. From the solution of the buildings and local relations I have overworked to inspissation of the whole PETRZALKA. First problem connected with this theme was the future of the block of flats, especially if they could be conserved and why people have so strange relation to the PETRZALKA. By solving this problem I have realized one thing, which mainly influenced my project. Reason why people do not believe this settlement is not related to the block of flats, but to the bad surrounding. Progressively I went from the house to the block, from the block to the Luky (part of Petrzalka), from the Luky to the Haje (another part of Petrzalka) and to the Dvory (another part of Petrzalka) and so the project PETRZALKA was established. Determining factor for me, were the roads as a natural nourishing artery of the city. Roads, which already exist are connected with the roads of the new city. Already existing vistas are fluently set in the new city structure. Aim became the concept of the future city, which combines the city functions and establishe miscellaneousness and variety of the citylife.

www.tesak.sk

VLAD NANCA : YOU ARE HERE

You are here is part of a series of works by Vlad Nanca in which expressions or phrases from popular culture or common language are being taken and re-appropriated. The installation at Gandy Gallery is first of all a likely dialogue between the Gallery (the institution, the artists, the exhibition) and the passers by and an invitation to the latter to re interpret the relation between themselves and that space. On a broader side it is an invitation to think deeper and about the self and the immediate surroundings and the environment in general. The original ìYou are hereî message scratched by the artist in the autumn of 2006 on a tree in a centuries old wood from Germany is an intimate gesture as opposed to the public message shown in the windows of Gandy Gallery. The photograph of the scratched tree was taken immediately after the action so today the tree is now most probably healed but scarred. Nancaís belief is that graffiti on trees is only a mere expression of love, and he tends to ignore the slightly violent, vandal side of it, specially in a broader context when thousands of square meters of woods throughout the world are being cut down every day in the name of economical progress. ìYou are hereî is commonly used on maps throughout cities, to indicate the place where the passer by is located. Nancaís work, however, leaves the map aside and invites the eyewitness to detach themselves from their routine and take a second to look at where they are, who they are and what they do in this world.

KATYA BONNENFANT : Se Quitter à Baden-Baden

If I start from se quitter à Baden-Baden, I should find a way to talk about this separation, but without the heavy thoughts normally associated of such event : betrayal, anger, jealousy, remords. The rupture, it's a little bit a way to arrange memories in drawers: "well, okay, it's finished". In my own drawers, I found some old vinyl covers. To try to tell the end of a love story, without clichés, or instead using the clichés, the records covers which talk almost only about love, but using them in cutting them, associating them, bending them, till they serve my reality, and not the one dictated by the genre, my reality, that means a little music, sad and happy in the same time, a soft small melody of the rupture.
All these old vinyl covers of songs already forgotten, would then become some material of word's love, "un matière d'amour", the sculpture would then be an assembly of souvenirs, traces of old love stories.
More generally, the use of old things (record covers, obsolete machines) is part of a left over's economy (écomnome de restes), an aesthetic of the second chance: stop the production, and watch at what we already have. I am looking at these records, these machines, with tenderness. With joy as well, a childlike joy. I am amazed by the beauty of an old dissected calculator. The excitation stay complete, everytime I am going to open a new machine, and every time I wonder what I am going to find inside. I am thinking about these graphic designers who have created these pictures, certainly with a lot of love, discussing with the artists, the musicians; I think about the industrials who have made and put together these machines, the ingeniors who have draw the plan. I take these stories for mine. But it's not rehabilitation or reprocessing, it's continuation. I extend their stories, and some other will come and will prolong it as well after me.

ComuniStar (SK)

In the terms of: 3 windows 4 U each of our designers' trio will fulfill one room of the Gandy Gallery's windows. "Small DANUBIAN DREAMS 2" is the continuation of the previous project in 2006 where addressed architects and designers made up small mobile huts.
ComuniStar designers are in a "smaller scale" following this conception, by producing objects for migrating people or vice versa creating objects which are inspired by them.
Nomad as a man, who is for various reasons and in different ways moving from a place to place is becoming the phenomenon of nowadays,no matter if he is a businessman, traveler, vacationist or even homeless.
Set of his specific needs is completing the need to feel some kind of home which he is always taking with him whereas he is on a constant journey. This kind of home is presented in an appearance of objects or just in a symbolic way. In the frame of the project DANUBIAN DREAMS 2 .ComuniStar designers are reacting on the nomad phenomenon and working with home symbols, via the designers creations are transporting to various aspects/positions towards people, who are the specific group.
Designers' creations can pose poetically, humorous or may ironically challenge to take a think about their real needs. They are as well inspired by traveling as a main activity of nomads in a form of interior accessories.

KATARINA POLIACIKOVA (SK) : "IF"

There is a whole new generation who remembers the past regime only through a child's eye and young people, to whom the word "communism" may sound more like a name of a prehistoric animal. The work "IF" deals with the problem of retelling personal memories and its reshape effect on the content. It also works as a rewind button, a return in time, thus putting in question what would be different if…