Gabriela Zigová: Dancing Through the Debris 2.0
About the Exhibition
Dancing Through the Debris 2.0 by Gabriela Zigová is a visual diary documenting a period the artist spent within communities and subcultures shaped by the club scene. Rather than serving as a documentary record of this environment, the exhibition offers an intimate account of the lived experiences of people whose lives are deeply intertwined with these communities. Zigová approaches photography as a bodily and affective medium; the images were created without distance, with the camera becoming an extension of her body and gaze.
This visual diary unfolds through the night, the body, relationships, and cities that entered and disappeared from the artist’s life. The project explores precarity not only as a condition of vulnerability, but also as a space of solidarity, care, joy, and resistance to normative ideas of life and time. It captures forms of belonging and collective existence that emerge on the margins of dominant social structures.
The result is an intimate archive of lived experience—a microhistory written through the body, the night, and collective experience. Dancing Through the Debris 2.0 traces a journey through the ruins of the present while bearing witness to the human capacity to find closeness, freedom, and new possibilities for living together.
Bio
Gabriela Zigová grew up in Trenčín and graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava, where she completed her studies in 2015 at Ilona Németh’s Open Studio. Since 2016, she has been based in London, where she became a member of the artist collective The Steamship PS Collective in 2018. This independent, artist-run gallery was located in the historic docks of East London until 2024.
Her artistic practice focuses on photography, performance, and spatial installations. By combining documentation with lived experience, she examines subcultural life as both an existential and political space—a temporary refuge where, despite instability and uncertainty, alternative forms of belonging, care, and resistance emerge. She recently brought these themes together in her book Dancing Through the Debris.
