aqb Aritst-in-Residence Program presentations

5:00 pm Ráchel JUTKA
5:30 pm Miriama KARDOŠOVÁ: World Search Tour
6:00 pm Zuzana-Makréta MACKOVÁ

Ráchel JUTKA

In this artist talk, Ráchel Jutka will present her latest mixed media works from the series Step Carefully, Yet Boldly (presented at the exhibition of Oskár Čepan Award 2025) and works from her solo show Object In the Mirror May Be Closer Than They Appear (2025, ARTA, SK). She will expand her thoughts about painting practice combined with the creation of objects containing specific memories and lyrical poetics, and her current painting projects, that she started during this residency.
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Ráchel Jutka, laureate of the Oskár Čepan Award 2025, is a painter and visual artist working in Košice. She completed her bachelor’s degree in Fine Art in northern Scotland (Moray School of Art; University of the Highlands and Islands, UK). She completed her master’s degree at the Painting Studio in Košice (Faculty of Arts, TUKE) under the supervision of doc. Mgr. art. Oto Hudec, ArtD. She currently exhibits her work regularly in Slovakia and abroad, in group and solo exhibitions, e.g. Art Is Not a Competition But I’m Winning, 2025, GJK, Trnava; New Contemporaries 2023, Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh; Bold Red Line, 2025, VUNU, Bratislava; Your Water Our Water, 2024, DELPHI_space, Freiburg & aqb Project Space, Budapest & U10 Space, Belgrade; Soil Not Oil, 2025, Slovak Institute in Prague, and others.

Rachel's residency was supported by the Slovak Art Council.

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Miriama KARDOŠOVÁ

Miriama Kardošová will present her performative project Victoria Oren and the aspects that gave life to the persona.
The Victoria Oren project is stylized into a hyperfeminine visuality, which also refers to historical stereotypes of the female body in pop culture, but destabilizes these patterns by physically entering into confrontation with the audience and disrupting the boundaries of intimacy.
She takes on the role of the "pop diva" – an archetype that has long been associated with an idealized representation of femininity in Western visual culture. She articulates the acceptance of "weirdness," monstrosity, imperfection and otherness as the only sustainable form of existence. Together with her "sisters," she stages a utopian space in which failure and vulnerability are transformed into an affective source of power.
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Miriama Kardošová (1988, Ilava) is a Slovak interdisciplinary artist based in Prague. Her work references monstrosity, posthumanism, and the decadence of pop culture. Kardošová's practice focuses on liminal spaces of corporeality, identity, and collective experience, within which she uses performance as a critical tool to destabilize hegemonic structures of representation. Her performances oscillate between the eruptive energy of punk aesthetics and decadent theatricality. She applies similar principles in her paintings, drawings, and installations. Kardošová is also co-founder of the performance collective Romeo & Hellion, which she established in 2021 together with the Slovak artist Jan Durina.

Miriama Kardošová’s and Zuzana-Markéta Macková’s residencies are part of the Deconstructing Myths project, organized by MeetFactory, KAiR, Goyki 3 Art Inkubator, and aqb, with the support of the International Visegrad Fund.

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Zuzana-Makréta MACKOVÁ

Zuzana-Markéta is currently working on a project, most likely a video essay, about the human need to create myths, particularly in moments of social or political crisis. She is particularly interested in the fabricated narrative attached to the folkloric ritual of Busójárás, which has been retrospectively linked to the Battle of Mohács that took place exactly 500 years ago. Nationalist narratives often recount the story of brave Hungarian men who supposedly frightened Ottoman troops with terrifying masks, even though this story has no historical basis. Despite this, the myth continues to circulate and shape contemporary cultural memory.
The final outcome will look at what it means, from an identity perspective, to wear a mask and how masking can both hide and reveal at the same time, concealing the individual while letting suppressed desires, fears, or collective fantasies come to the surface. Zuzana-Markéta brings together visual and symbolic elements from Busójárás, online furry culture, and incel subcultures to speculate on how different communities use masks, animal imagery, and performative identities.
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Zuzana-Markéta Macková (*1999, she/her) is a Czech moving-image-based artist and curator working between Berlin and Prague. She works primarily with video, performance, and LARP. Her practice explores themes such as speculative fiction, hypercapitalism, East vs. West, and conspiracy theories. These interests are often articulated through audience manipulation, humor, pop-cultural references, and meta-modernity.
She earned an MA at the Dutch Art Institute (2021–2023) and a BcA at FAMU (2019–2021) in the Department of Photography, Studio of New Aesthetics. She has exhibited internationally at venues including Museum of Jurassic Technologies (Los Angeles, USA), 90mil (Berlin, Germany), BACO (Bergamo, Italy), Centrale Fies (Dro, Italy), DOCK (Basel, Switzerland), Fotopub (Novo Mesto, Slovenia), GHMP (Prague, Czech Republic), Mustarinda Residency (Hyrynsalmi, Finland), and NIDA Art Colony (Nida, Lithuania).
As a curator, she led Panel Gallery (2019–2020), co-founded the experimental audio collective Until Further Notice during the pandemic, and collaborated with Simona Binko from Tschechisches Zentrum Berlin on the CCAiB series (2024–2025). In 2025, she curated the group exhibition All that is solid melts like my blush after a long shift at GAMU in Prague. She is a member of Display – Association for Research and Collective Practice, part of the Berlin-based ACUD space, and occasionally contributes writing to Artalk.

Miriama Kardošová’s and Zuzana-Markéta Macková’s residencies are part of the Deconstructing Myths project, organized by MeetFactory, KAiR, Goyki 3 Art Inkubator, and aqb, with the support of the International Visegrad Fund.