Slide lecture set on Slovakian photography

The talk will be co-sponsored by the UB Department of Art, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center and CEPA. The presentation will be free of charge and open to the public.

Benicka will present photographic works by 23 photographers through which she will illuminate trends in Slovakian art from the late 1980s to the early 1990s. This is the period during which the Slovak New Wave developed out of the staged-photography movement that took place in the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

Her lecture will feature examples of documentary photography and works in mixed media and include a discussion of the artistic exchange between the older and younger generation of Eastern European artists. Benicka also will talk about the radical social and cultural transformations taking place in Eastern and Central Europe as a way of contextualizing the cultural climate from which this work evolved.

Benicka is a graduate of the University Komenského in Bratislava, where she received her degrees in art history and aesthetics. She lectures on contemporary photography at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava.

She has brought Slovakian artists, critics, theoreticians and art historians together through workshops, conferences, seminars and presentations of their work. Benicka also has lectured on Slovakian photography to gallery and university audiences throughout England and was a Fulbright Fellow and visiting researcher at Columbia University and Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Photography.