Victory Art News: Kicking off 2019 with Mima Chovancova

Send-off / And your ancestors shall prop your feet from down below

Mima Chovancová

The villagers are gathered; they have all come to witness.

The flowers are arranged; a soft bed awaits you.

The feast is ready; music will play and people will dance in your honor.

Nothing is missing.
Your moment has come.
It will be your last celebration but for sure the grandest.
And after that, you won’t have to spend eternity alone.

In Slovakian folklore, the funeral of a young, unmarried person used to strongly resemble a wedding. It was a tradition meant to complete the circle of life for someone that didn’t have the chance to live long enough in order to experience everything; a final celebratory event that was meant to send off the departed with everything in order.

Who is Mima Chovancová?

Victory Art started the year of 2019 on a high note by collaborating with RAW Streetphoto Gallery to host our first exhibition ever: Introducing Mima Chovancová. It introduced an exclusive and fresh perspective of contemporary Eastern and Central European art with an emphasis on the Slovak Republic. Who is Mima? She is an artist, a storyteller, a color poet. Her raw artistic perspective on contemporary society questioned cultural identity and one’s place in society. Slovakian folklore and culture remain the central theme in Mima’s latest years of production with practice to explore both their stereotypical ramification and their forgotten rituals. Through engaging with lyrics and writing poetry herself as a part of her creative process, she uses titles to link the visual language she uses to the emotional world of pop songs.

“I think everyone is a storyteller to some extent and I communicate best visually,” says Mima Chovancová. Growing up in post-socialist Slovakia in the 90s, western toys and MTV have influenced her visual vocabulary and color sensibility. She composes her pieces as visual color-poems. Inspired by the themes of cultural self-awareness, childhood memories, aesthetic of 80s pop songs, history, architecture, and everyday human drama, Mima’s artwork represents Slovakia’s cultural heritage and the concept of national identity runs as the core of her practice and research. Through practice, she reflects on the elements that have shaped her identity and thus attempts to understand herself and others.

The exhibition opening which took place on the 12th of January 2019 launched with a kick-off by the founder of Victory Art, Viktória Pikovská, and the director of Raw Streetphoto Gallery, Alexey Shiffman. It was then followed by an official opening of the exhibition by the Ambassador of Slovak Republic, HE Roman Bužek. During the opening address, Victory Art also presented him with a gift: one of Mima’s new pieces. Her artwork focuses on the history of Slovak culture, its mythology, and collective identity in the context of artistic expression. The artist even made a fascinating speech exploring her first work of art and her transition from fashion to the fine art industry. Her introduction to the art industry was surprising with a decaying wall in her studio and her mission to highlight cracks and fill them with appealing colors. The artist mentioned that even though she did not know what turn her career was taking, she felt confident in the belief that the point of art is not to have the answers but to rather point out the questions, even if they are things that might seem mundane for other people to notice. That is when she realized that fine art was indeed the right pathway in her life.

In the months leading up to the exhibition, the curator Marthina Von Loeben worked with Mima Chovancová to help deepen and hone Mima’s already exception work. The result is a new collection of art pieces that beautifully and poignantly nods its head to Slovak folklore and culture, unlike her previous visually loud collection. The artist fabricated her latest vision in the form of abstract art while celebrating the fragility and resilience of humankind. Her new works are a small tribute to the Slovakian culture and its rituals surrounding death. Through the use of illustrative elements and visual metaphors in her pieces, she explores the themes of Slovak rituals, death, and everyday human drama in a lyrical way. The overall aesthetic of her latest pieces, although consisting of heavy themes, is lighter and smaller, and more intimate in comparison to her previous work. Mima believes that with a focus on the composition, gesture, color, and emotional impact in her works of art, she is able to capture an authentic place of understanding of the importance of rituals in connection to identity and the feeling of belonging.