This summer, VUNU presents three exhibitions that together outline a shared curatorial horizon of Niki Bernáth, who is also the director of the gallery. At Kasárne/Kulturpark in Košice, TRANSPEED reflects on movement and speed as conditions of contemporary life. At VUNU Košice, FAUX TWINS examines surface, doubling, and the unstable relation between imitation and reality. At VUNU Bratislava, NEVER ENOUGH introduces Oskar Felber’s recent shift from abstraction toward figuration. Each of these projects opens a distinct perspective, while collectively they map the questions and tensions shaping art today.

The exhibition TRANSPEED presented by Kasarne c/o VUNU and co-curated by Peter Bencze, takes its starting point from the thinking of Paul Virilio, who identified speed as a fundamental political force shaping societies and their spaces. At Kasárne/Kulturpark, the project explores the ontology of movement in an era of hypermobility, focusing on the automobile as both symbol and medium. Far beyond a simple means of transport, the car emerges here as an apparatus of perception and control, embodying paradoxes between freedom and restriction, desire and ecological burden, progress and decline. Through the works of Botond Keresztesi, Stano Filko, Frieda Toranzo Jaeger, Dorottya Vékony, Réka Lőrincz, Selma Selman, Róza El-Hassan, Milica Tomic, Andrej Dubravsky and Gábor Pintér, the exhibition stages the automobile as an image of civilizational tension and as a metaphor for the compression of time, space and identity.

The group exhibition FAUX TWINS at VUNU Košice brings together artists Lilla Gombos, Matej Maturkanič, Jelisaveta Rapaić, Kanrec Sakul, Boris Sirka, Adam Šakový and Milan Vagač. The works probe the relationship between surface, materiality and meaning, taking cues from traditions of trompe-l’oeil and faux finishing. Each artwork appears doubled, accompanied by its counterpart, producing systems of seriality where repetition becomes a form of difference rather than reproduction. Through such doubling, the works question the thresholds between imitation and reality, singularity and multiplicity, destabilizing what appears fixed. Surface becomes both a place of deception and a site of ontological depth.

At VUNU Bratislava, NEVER ENOUGH presents Oskar Felber’s new turn toward figuration after an extended engagement with geometric abstraction. His recent paintings bring forth fictional portraits and fractured bodies that oscillate between concealment and revelation. Layers of oil and acrylic form dense, sculptural surfaces in which gestures collide with rigid structures, fluorescent hues with murky grounds. The works unfold as unresolved narratives, disrupted and rewritten through constant overpainting, evoking a friction between joy and violence. In this new cycle, Felber’s canvases hover in a state of visual unrest, bearing witness to the precarious balance between destruction and creation, and suggesting that painting itself can become a form of restless self-portraiture.

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