We invite you to a guided tour of the exhibition The Hardest Thing Is to Predict the Past – Jana Gombiková.
Curator: Piotr Gąska
Where: Nová Vlna Gallery
When: 9 January 2026 at 5:00 PM
Admission: Free
Jana Gombiková was born in Trenčín. She is a graduate of the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava and the Institute of Creative Photography in Opava. In her artistic practice, she explores themes of individual and collective memory, identity, and subjective experience, often working with a combination of text and image.
According to the latest scientific studies, when we recall memories, we do not reproduce what was remembered—we reconstruct it. Every time we remember an event, we attempt to fill in gaps, reinterpret details, or add new information based on our current knowledge, emotions, intuitions, or the present shape of our personal narrative. Each return to a memory creates a new version of the story, making it almost impossible to “predict” the past—or even to understand it precisely.
In her series The Hardest Thing Is to Predict the Past, I explore how memory functions and the possibilities of constructing alternative versions of one’s own story through the medium of photography. By re-scanning and intervening in my own negatives, I create new interpretations of what was recorded—much like the process of remembering itself. Unlike digital photography, analogue material is physical evidence of a given moment’s existence. Yet, like memory, photography is not a record of reality, but rather its fragment or interpretation. But is the person who looks at the photographs today the same person who created them?
Our memories shape us just as much as we shape them.
