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Through the holes in your tee, I can see love
Karina Golisova
13 May - 20 Jun
PV: Tue, 12 May, 6-9pm
curated by Michal Nanoru
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.
Exhibition catalogue
Press pack
ARTIST’S BIO
Karina Golisová (*1997) works primarily with documentary photography. A significant aspect of her practice is the concept of the chosen family, which she understands as a meaningful alternative to the traditional family model. Through her work, she explores how friendships and communities can function as sources of resilience in the current era of polycrisis. Photographic zines play a key role in her practice—she approaches them not only as artistic objects, but also as an accessible medium that can reach audiences beyond traditional gallery spaces. Within this format, she focuses on the dramaturgy of images and the reinterpretation of existing material, creating new layers of meaning and reflecting on different life stages.
She is active in the Slovak and Czech underground music scene, where she has long documented events and contributed to shaping its visual identity. She is the author of several self-published photographic zines, including Utopia, Published, and Underground.
She received her bachelor’s degree from the Department of Photography and New Media at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava. During her studies, she also spent a semester in Finland at the Department of Documentary Photography in Lahti. She later completed her master’s degree at FAMU in Prague and is currently pursuing a PhD at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava.
CURATOR’S BIO
Michal Nanoru is a Czech writer, editor and curator residing in London. His exhibition projects include a comprehensive survey of snapshot strategies’ influence on artists working with photography Only The Good Ones: The Snapshot Aesthetic Revisited at Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague, or Taryn Simon: A Soldier Is Taught To Bayonet The Enemy And Not Some Undefined Abstraction at the Albertinum in Dresden. He has published several books on visual culture, including the subcultural favourite We Saw Up a Cutting Board, an oral and visual history of Czech skateboarding before 1990, and Here Be Dogs, on visuality of Czech indie scene, and has contributed to others, like the German painter Katharina Grosse’s Wunderbild.
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