Maj Horn’s work combines socially engaged art with an installation merging costumes, masks, images and organic materials. The installation serves as a workshop and meeting place, where Horn collaborates with local artists, designers, and theatre professionals to create masks. The mask-makers take turns to become hosts, inviting visitors to contribute to the collaborative process.
This exhibition emerges from a deep curiosity about the strange and wonderful, and also irritating plants and animals, with whom we share urban habitats and surrounding landscapes. As part of her artistic practice, Maj Horn asks herself the following questions: Which plants and animals do I see and how do I value them? How do plants, animals and humans coexist together in the same environment? How can I expand my awareness and understanding of other species and their ways of being in the world, their superpowers?
To explore these questions, Horn has developed a working method: she selects a plant or animal and gathers knowledge and stories about it. She chooses species with whom humans have a deep history and complex relationship with. The exhibition features four figures that she has been working with in performances and workshops over the past few years: the cow, the pigeon, the nettle and the beaver. The beaver is the newest figure and is chosen specific for Trenčín: After being absent from Slovakia for over a century due to human hunting, the beaver has returned and now lives in the centre of Trenčín.
As part of her work, Maj Horn creates masks and costumes. She uses used textiles, paper, and organic materials. This approach becomes a method of seeing other species, and working with material transformation as forms of changing perspective. In the exhibition this approach is combined with Slovak folkloric animal mask traditions.
A site-responsive process took place prior to the exhibition in Spring and Fall, 2025. Numerous meetings and events were held with ecologists, artists and other local people. Gradually, a community emerged, sharing stories about their connections with, and knowledge of, the plants and animals of Trenčín and the surrounding area. These public events included lectures, performances, workshops, shared meals, and walks. We held discussions with herbalist and plant guide Veronika Repková, and with artist, researcher, and urbanist Isa Klee, focusing on how sustainable interspecies relationships can be built in times of climatic and social change. Together with Sylva Mertanová, director of the Administration of the White Carpathians Protected Landscape Area, we visited a site inhabited by beavers.
The exhibition will culminate in a walk. On 1 March, a public performance will bring all the masks and costumes to life.
Maj Horn (b. 1987, Denmark) lives and works in Copenhagen. Her artistic practice explores nature-culture relations, storytelling and ecological thinking. She works with performance, installation and socially engaged art. She holds a master’s degree from the Funen Art Academy, followed by postgraduate courses in Nature Interpretation in Theory and Practice at the University of Copenhagen.
Hosts: Jana Gombiková, Kasha Potrohosh, Paulína Pokryvková, Peter Kepeňa, Petra Daneková, Piotr Gaska, Zuzu Hudek
Exhibition design: Juraj Hubinský, Dušan Chrastina, Ján Šimo
Costumes: Lenka Kadlečíková
Graphic design: Hanna Bergman
Film and editing: Braňo Bibel, Eduardo Abrantes
Project coordinators: Mária Klačková, Veronika Marek Markovičová
Supported by: Select s.r.o., Matica slovenská
