September 9 – October 9, 2023
Artists: Gabriela Zigová, Zuzana Sabová
Guests: Peter Sulo, Jana Gombiková
Curator: Lucia Gavulová
The exhibition I’ve Seen This Somewhere Before at the creative centre For maat by artists Zuzana Sabová and Gabriela Zigová reflects on the question of both personal and artistic identity in the era of Artificial Intelligence (AI), while also highlighting the depth, nature, and unartificial authenticity of interpersonal relationships rooted in values such as friendship and collaboration.
The dramaturgy of the exhibition follows a symbolic timeline, inviting the audience on a journey—from a glimpse into the artists’ shared personal history, their friendship and mutual influence presented through a unique personal archive, to the current creation of a joint artistic alter ego, a single creative entity formed by the merging of both authors.
Their collaborative works, predominantly object-based, are generated by merging and interlinking pre-existing artworks, often combining the media most commonly used by both Zigová and Sabová—performance and object, object and photography, printmaking, drawing, and spatial installation—with an overlap into physical interventions involving their own bodies. The body plays a central role in their work, whether as a content carrier and mediator (in the spirit of body art), or as sculpture and form.
The combinations of artworks used as a starting point for this exhibition were created using Midjourney, an AI-powered tool that generates realistic images from user prompts. These were then materialized and translated into physical artworks and installed in the gallery space.
The multimedia exhibition also features several paintings by Peter Sulo, which naturally resonate with and complement the show's content, as well as photographic portraits of the artists by Jana Gombiková, which further contribute to the narrative being communicated through the installation.
The creation process of I’ve Seen This Somewhere Before—and its outcome—is a challenge for the artists themselves, who spent several weeks developing the show directly within the gallery. It can also be understood as a free-form laboratory exploring identity through the lens (and skills) of new technologies, expanding imagination and offering speculative insights into possible futures. Last but not least, it represents another developmental stage or intermediate point in the long-standing creative relationship between the two artists.
Curatorial text here
Photo by Jana Gombiková, Dušan Chrastina