The solo exhibition of Nik Timková at Kostka Gallery enters us into a tightly composed scenographic situation in which reading and dreaming overlap with an alert perception of social meanings. The architecture of the installation deliberately blurs the boundary between interior and exterior and creates a magical yet restful environment whose centre of gravity is a large carpet printed with a digital collage – the central work that transforms the plane of an imaginary interior into an enchanted reading room with a domestic feel, which, together with simple furnishings, invites immersion in the artist’s curated poetic texts. Here the haptic dimension carries meaning: the textile objects address not only the eye but also the skin and muscle memory. Their seams, fibres and substance become legible, and touch rewrites, confirms and questions meaning within them.

Timková has long developed the deconstruction of clothing toward textile architecture and design at a larger-than-life scale, connecting the material corporeality of cloth with sculptural and scenographic functions; she interweaves digital collage with pop-cultural, new-gothic, esoteric and manga iconographies, drawing on DIY and post-internet strategies of appropriation. A prominent role is played by reclaimed denim, a material she has engaged for years. It carries the memory of an originally working-class fabric that Timková employs as sculptural matter – roughly patched objects, pictorial grounds, a readymade of monumental “macho” jeans in a Y2K vein, or the surface of oversized textile hands – pursuing an ironic, subversive line against our habits of seeing and the fetishes of design. A denim trio of cats, inspired by the artist’s own pets, is stripped of mere cuteness and entrusted with the function of liminal guardians of reading rituals. The walls are adorned with a series of bobbin-lace works on denim supports. This old technique of hand-interlacing threads departs from traditional geometric patterning and turns toward contemporary iconography – from the wistful “emo face” of the noughties and a ball of yarn with a playing cat to a medievally morbid dish bearing the eyes of St.Lucy – culminating in a DIY-fabricated lace pillow serving here as the base for a bobbin-laced pop-cultural tag, “True Love.”

Thus you want this place to be everything weaves, from the long-built layers of the artist’s works and sources, a polysemous collage in the form of a magical yet comfortably appointed oracle that can transform into countless variants of itself according to our wishes. Throughout the exhibition, the installation will be complemented by reading-performative

sessions by the Björnsonova collective, with whom the artist shares a feminist and ecofeminist orientation and a ritual engagement with text and the body.

— Ján Gajdušek