Opening Event – Pop-up Action – Screening of the video No Shelter from the Storm and a Talk with the Artists Anca Benera & Arnold Estefan, moderated by Agnieszka Kilian and Jaro Varga – will take place on Friday, May 2, 2025, at 5:00 PM.
With the presentation of this multilayered work, we also aim to transform the waiting room in the City Hall building – the City Development Center – into a modern agora, an active space for discussion.
You can come to see the artwork until May 16, 2025, every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday from 2:00 PM to 5:00 PM.
No Shelter from the Storm
The video was created ten years ago, in 2015, by the Romanian artistic duo Anca Benera & Arnold Estefan in one of the last remaining primeval forests in Europe, on the border with Ukraine. The central theme of the work is the relationship between militarism and the natural environment of border areas and its ecological destruction. Using simple means – the combination of imagery of the Carpathian mountain forest with the anti-war song Where Have All the Flowers Gone? – they offer a contextualized perspective on a global issue: how to promote anti-war and pacifist ideals? The screening of the film aptly titled No Shelter from the Storm urges us to reconsider the mechanisms of how to face today’s global challenges.
Anca Benera and Arnold Estefan are an artist duo based in Vienna and Bucharest. Their work includes installations, videos, and performances.
The duo is interested in the ideological structures hidden behind historical, social, and geopolitical narratives, as well as the military and political impact on the environment. Their works have been exhibited in exhibitions and biennials including: Potential Worlds, Migros Museum, Zürich (2021); Natural Histories. Traces of the Political, MUMOK, Vienna (2017); Sounds and Sites, The Jewish Museum, New York (2016); Global Control and Censorship, ZKM, Karlsruhe (2016); Der Brancusi Effekt, Kunsthalle, Vienna (2015); Mum, am I barbarian?, 13th Istanbul Biennial (2013); Intense Proximity, La Triennale, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2012).
Agnieszka Kilian is a curator, writer, and researcher based in Słupsk and Berlin. She has previously collaborated with the Berlin gallery nGbK and since 2024 serves as the director of the Baltic Gallery of Contemporary Art in Słupsk.
In her projects, she often addresses the concepts of trial and justice – not only as abstract terms but also as deeply emotional experiences.
By combining exhibition formats and educational programs, she seeks new institutional models that are not only participatory but also emancipatory and inclusive. Her curatorial and co-curatorial projects include, for example: We, the People (Central Slovak Gallery, 2019), Dreams & Dramas. Law as Literature along with the accompanying publication (nGbK, 2017), End of Time (Kunsthaus Dresden, 2015), and behind the togetherness (tranzit.sk, Bratislava, 2014).
Jaro Varga is an artist and curator based in Prague and Bratislava. In his work, he explores memory, forgetting, and the power mechanisms associated with space and knowledge. He works with archives, maps, installation, and text, often intervenes in public space, and creates fictional scenarios that disrupt established readings of places and histories. His works encourage viewers to re-evaluate what we consider known and fixed.
In recent years, he has held solo exhibitions at the Goethe Institute in Bratislava, the Tàpies Foundation and Museu Picasso in Barcelona, Album Arte in Rome, Hunt Kastner Gallery in Prague, and elsewhere. In 2019, he undertook a residency at the Delfina Foundation in London, in 2022 at Sa Sa Art in Phnom Penh (Cambodia), and at the Headlands Center for the Arts in San Francisco. In 2023, he presented the exhibitions In Someone Else’s Game (Ivan Gallery, Bucharest) and Travel Tales in The Land (Haifa Museum of Art, Israel). In 2024, he created the work Silence Will Not Protect Us, which was produced at the Synagogue – Center for Contemporary Art GJK in Trnava and was also presented at the Pohoda festival, in the Synagogue in Stupava, and in the City Library in Bratislava as part of White Night.
