Nik Timková

Nik Timková is a Slovak artist with deep roots in the international scene. Although she completed her bachelor's degree at the Faculty of Arts of the Technical University in Košice, she obtained her Master's degree at the Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design in London. She is currently working as an assistant in the Studio of Painting II at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, and in collaboration with Björnsonova platform she participates in the postgraduate course Collective Research Practice at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm.

Her activities are interwoven with a complex web of collective bodies of various transient groups or platforms. Since 2009 she has been a member of A.M.180., a team already behind the cult festival of contemporary music Creepy Teepee, taking place every year in the medieval landscape of Kutna Hora. Like the festival itself, is not just a spectacle of monolithic music projects, but also a place for performances and visual arts, as well gallery A.M.180, where Timková works as co-curator, is a place of hybrid cultural activities. She also presented a series of exhibitions called #Cut Club, in which she gave space for designers to evaluate fashion and clothing artifacts as separate art objects.

Similarly, Nik Timková's artistic work is more of a lifestyle and a constant movement in intersecting cultural fields of internet culture, DIY practices and magical practices. From her initial interest in post-internet strategies, she gradually developed a personal iconography intertwining pop-cultural and occult symbolism, but in recent years processed mainly by craft work processes such as ceramics or sewn objects, moving between autonomous and utility artifacts, which can be traced for example in the series of exhibitions Existential Housekeeping (2014-2015), Knife As Outfit in Polansky Gallery (2017) or From Dead To Worse in the 35m2 Gallery (2018–2019).

The interest in the transgressive potential of magic and witchcraft has been been transformed by Timková's creation into a more radical form, examining the very structure of collective self-organizing. In 2017, a platform was set up on the occasion of the Oskar Čepan Award with the Björnsonova platform being created into something which could be viewed as "internet and anime junkie as well as herbalist and nerd who swallows performance theory”. It embodies a fictitious collective body, mutating the organism without clear contours through which it is possible to think better of the forms of the future, to escape from the toxic presence and necessity of climate disaster. The Björnsonova demonstration was possible to watch at the exhibitions Harvesting Darkness (FUTURA gallery in Prague, 2018, subsequently Východoslovenská galéria v Košiciach, 2018) and The Room Without Any Water In It (Acud Gallery, Berlin, 2019). Another excursion into the dissolving collectivity, or even authorship, is a music-performative project The Melancholy of Marissa Cooper, where Timková performs most often as a DJ with dance accompaniment by the artist Zuzana Žabková, although the performance may involve several participants. An identity bearing a tragic name of a (anti-)heroine from a series aims to deepen the intensity of collective ecstasy, typical of club culture.

Tina Poliačková