New Year with Slovak Art – original New Year’s greetings from LITA
At LITA, we believe that even a small thing such as a New Year’s greeting can promote Slovak art and highlight its quality. That’s why we started the New Year with Slovak Art project, as part of which we annually ask Slovak authors to create a thematic greeting. The greeting always focuses on a key LITA area – literature, theatre, audiovisual or visual arts.
Every year, invited authors create a New Year’s greeting concept for LITA. We then send the greeting to our partners and the public via post, website and social networks. The greeting always includes the artwork – a thematic tangible object which is displayed at LITA’s premises.
PF 2025 – New Year with Slovak Stage Design
PF 2025 was created for you by award-winning scenographer and costume designer Alžbeta Kutliaková, also known under the pseudonym Bet Moth. This New Year’s greeting dedicated to stage design looks back upon 2024 in Slovak culture and tries to find hope even under unfavourable circumstances.
A Year of (un)Favourable Situations is a work composed of two parts, consisting of a thematic object – a card file – and a related card, part of the greeting sent by post. The card file has two drawers labelled 2024 and 2025. The first contains a miniature of the author’s studio littered by crumpled sketches. As Bet Moth writes in her accompanying text: “Crumpled pieces of paper are a visual metaphor of lost possibilities and unfulfilled dreams, frustration and uncertainty experienced by individuals and culture in this difficult period.” The second drawer labelled 2025 contains only a black sheet of paper – an imaginary empty theatre black box which represents the beginning of a creative process. The author views this as a space full of endless possibilities which: “... is an invitation to look towards the future with determination and an open mind.” The black sheet of paper is also included in the greeting. Its recipients will find instructions inside to use light. This is because the paper contains a blind-embossed picture. By using light, a graphic design, which also works with the motive of crumpled papers, is revealed fully. This is accompanied by Bet Moth’s handwritten message – a wish that ideas should not linger on paper.
PF 2024 – New Year with Slovak Art
The PF 2024 greeting was created by writer Dominika Moravčíková and interdisciplinary artist Jan Durina. For the first time in the project’s history, the greeting united two art forms in a dialogue – literature and photography.
The writing has no blood work connects a poem by Dominika Moravčíková and a photograph by Jan Durina. The authors reflect on whether art has the power to change anything, and they imply that authors feel increasingly sceptical. Yet nevertheless, Moravčíková concludes her poem by expressing the hope that if art can be created under free conditions, then it has the power to mediate thoughts and make them real, to be their “carrier or vessel”.
PF 2023 – New Year with Slovak Photography
The New Year’s greeting (PF) for 2023 was created by award-winning photographer Ján Viazanička. It is dedicated to photography, and reflects the current situation in society – highlighting that even though we live in the same space, we understand each other less and less. The author encourages us to try and understand each other more.
Ján Viazanička used a photographic collage to create an oversized block of flats. A decrepit building in the image is a symbol of our shared space, but still bears the name Divided Society. Viazanička’s work refers to growing polarisation, radicalisation of public discourse, and prevailing misunderstanding, yet also gives hope – encouraging us to repair our relationships, to listen to each other, and to try to understand, which can help us mend broken bonds.
PF 2022 – New Year with Slovak Film
The New Year’s greeting for 2022 was created by award-winning animated film director Martin Smatana. It is dedicated to film production, and accentuates the social importance of art in the light of the corona crisis. It reminds us that art helped us through our loneliness during the pandemic, and also has the potential to help us through future hard times.
The greeting is based on the Home Cinema textile painting. Smatana was inspired by an international article about neighbours who resourcefully compensated for a covid-enforced lack of mutual contact through artistic experience at “community” film screenings from the safety of their homes. The artwork was also part of a short animation.
PF 2021 – New Year with Slovak Literature
PF 2021 was created by an atypical author – neuron network and poet Liza Gennart. The work transformed into our PF 2021 was Liza’s poem To Write. The simple text resembles a human-written poem, and reflects on creation, life and intransience. Despite the illusion it creates in a reader, it is the work of artificial intelligence – a neural network, a computer program taught to create artistic texts.
Liza Gennart was created by poet Zuzana Husárová and musician Ľubomír Panák as a poetic experiment. Having “taught her to write” for several years, Liza Gennart published her debut collection of poems, Výsledky vzniku (The Results of Emergence) in 2020 (publisher Vlna/Drewo a srd). In the greeting’s accompanying text, they state that Liza Gennart’s creation tests the boundaries of our thinking about literature and authorship. The greeting for 2021 thus once again goes further than previous ones in its reflection on art.
PF 2020 – New Year with Slovak Theatre
The PF 2020 greeting was authored by award-winning theatre director Júlia Rázusová. Her New Year's greeting references theatre’s key nature: transience and complexity. "Theatre embraces 'here and now' events that happen at the moment. As such, every theatre performance is unique and one-off. The coming together of performers and audiences at a given moment is a kind of absolute meeting,” writes Júlia Rázusová in her accompanying text.
The New Year’s card took the form of a shredded page from the production’s original text with the director's notes: ACT I. Shredding of the director's notebook. The work also implies that direction cannot be separated from the work of other artists involved in the creation of a play, and that how the director works with the text is about more than its interpretation – it’s also a question of creative response.
PF 2019 – New Year with Slovak Visual Art
We asked visual artist Martin Derner to create our very first greeting – an object made of books called Detective Story I. This work is part of his Housing Situation series, which the author has been developing for several years. The final greeting is a high-quality frameable printed photography.
