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UPCOMING | Through the holes in your tee, I can see love by Karina Golisova
Join us for the private view on Tue, 12 May, 6-9pm.
Miłość is proud to present Slovak photographer Karina Golisova’s first solo exhibition, Through the holes in your tee, I can see love curated by Michal Nanoru.
This whole project is pushing out of me from an absolute and urgent need to think about relationships, define them or point to them. It's about making something palpable that I’ve been collecting for years—a physical confirmation of the existence of this network of relationships.
For nine years Karina has been photographing an intimate circle, “in which I’m built in”—a scene, that in the meantime blew up into a Central European punk royalty waging a daily battle with the obvious. Here in the back, however, the stage doesn’t show, we stay far from the madding crowd. Firmly in the tradition of Magdalenes and Veronicas, Golisova, a former textiles student, brings her veils and ointments and prints into them, visualises her invisible female labour: caring for the battered warriors tilting at semantic windmills. Instead of the scream of modern man, she shows kindness, consideration, attention, healing. Instead of confrontation: empathy. Embraces, touches, cats, matching leopard outfits, and swathed buildings. Now dispersed between countries and tens and millions of streams, the scene still stands out for its solidarity and cohesion.
All the photos selected from an ever-growing body of work, that started with Golisova's moving into a building slated for demolition in the Slovak capital, Bratislava, are professions of love. Just as all her self-published books and zines manifest tight-knit community and all her underground exhibitions and performances so far moonlighted as thinly veiled excuses to meet.
The photographs form part of the mythology of the group and its individuals, often serving as promotional tools. “I watch how the personal becomes public,” Golisova says, moving between keepsake album and monument, between intimacy and history. All the proprieties are in place: antiheroes resisting social power, fate and often themselves; passion; destruction; and captcha done in one’s own blood. It helps that your crew looks like Balenciaga backstage and you yourself resemble Jane Morris’s sister or a long-missing member of the Bloomsbury Group. Consciously or not, the camera rides in the tracks of these and other cool—and endearing—gangs and their representations across the ages, stylising its subjects, canonising them through composition, drawing them closer to gods, martyrs and stars.And the power generated by joining this lineage carries the message far and high as it gestures towards social change, an emotional revolution. Fellowship becomes movement. The personal is political.
“What I do comes from a deep need to make tangible the fact that my relationships with my friends—and relationships in general—are for me a source of enormous psychological resilience at a time of a collapsing world. Being with friends in any form is the most nourishing environment I can inhabit. And perhaps the only thing I could pass on through what I do is that people shouldn’t give up on relationships. Especially friendships. I don’t need the viewer to know a specific story, but to feel the presence and the tension between intimacy and publicness,” Golisova declares. It’s this euphoria of affinity, affirmation, ease and safety behind the chocolate-factory wall that Golisova’s group conjures. It sounds sentimental and banal, until you find yourself sharing the last cracker with your quisling neighbour.
Words by Michal Nanoru.
Request the exhibition catalogue or press pack.
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