Nightlife, clubs, protests, friendships and communities emerging amid uncertainty. In collaboration with the Slovak Institute in Vienna, Trenčín 2026 will present the work of visual artist Gabriela Zigová at PARALLEL Vienna 2026. We will bring a selection from her project Dancing Through the Rubble to Vienna.
Gabriela Zigová grew up in Trenčín but has spent the past ten years living and working in London. Her experience of life across different cities, communities and environments is strongly reflected in her photographic work.
Dancing Through the Rubble is a personal visual archive of a decade of life between London, Berlin and Havana. Zigová photographs from within the action, capturing nightlife, clubs, temporary spaces, protests, friendships and communities that emerge in conditions of uncertainty.
Not an observer, but part of the action
As curator Lucia Gavulová writes about her work, Gabriela Zigová’s photographs are not created from a safe distance. The artist is a direct participant in the situations she photographs.
The result is therefore not a conventional documentary record of events. Instead, the photographs primarily capture states and experiences – euphoria, exhaustion, intimacy, disorientation and intensity.
The raw, immediate and deliberately unpolished visual language offers a view from within. Nightlife is not merely a backdrop. It becomes a space where new forms of relationships, belonging and shared life emerge.
An archive of a generation
Dancing Through the Rubble can also be read as an archive of survival – a microhistory of a generation navigating between uncertainty and the desire for closeness, between exhaustion and intensity, and between the collapse of old certainties and the creation of new forms of coexistence.
A selection from the project will be presented at PARALLEL Vienna 2026 in collaboration with the Slovak Institute in Vienna.
