Pavol Breier is a Slovak documentary photographer. Subjects typical of his work are mountain and alpine nature and the lives of the people in its embrace. Photographs published in the portfolio includes three series. The common characteristic feature of them is time-lapse. Tales from Zázrivá tells the story of shepherds and herdsmen from Zázrivá. The series lends a new look to a story which is at once both old and new – the cabinet arrangements of mementos of the past bring us closer to the “salašník” or mountain shepherd of the 1970s, and his traditional pastoral life in an untouched landscape encircled dramatically by mountains, in dialogue with full colour, large-format evocative portraits from the present day. Hrob [Grave] is a documentary about an Orthodox religious pilgrimage in eastern Slovakia. In the 1970s, believers made this pilgrimage once a year to the hill of Horb to visit a hermit monk during the celebrations of the Feast of the Transfiguration. The author returned here after 50 years to capture the changes in this genius loci and the character of the pilgrimage itself. The monuments, covered before their unveiling, inspired Breier to create a series of photographs and photomontages in which the figures of socialist realism were transformed into phantoms of socialist surrealism. After November 1989, Breier saw that some monuments were covered up, to never be unveiled again. They were covered before their removal. By photographing them in this form, he documented the individual phases of life of these monuments, a time arc that has finally come to a close.

In my work Sphere Dance, I am exploring multiple sclerosis, the autoimmune illness that I suffer from. This project is part of my artistic research conducted within my doctoral thesis, Disease in Photography and Its Visuality. As a bearer of the disease and an artist, I examine my illness through personal experience, time, space, emotion, my body, family, scientific facts, and interviews with experts—and my visual/photographic reflection is a key component of this approach. I use indirect means of expression through staged photographs and collages rather than documentary photography, as I deem my experience with the illness hardly transferrable. Even though the disease is always present with me, it remains, in many ways, abstract. I decided to work through this deeply personal life theme to gain distance and perspective on both the disease and myself. I decompose my experience into the smallest details to consciously explore and process aspects that I am unable to perceive clearly in the everyday rhythm of life.

The study examines the transformation of institutional strategies for engaging audiences with art in the context of contemporary Slovak and Central European cultural policy. Active support for participation and audience building covers a comprehensive set of strategies and practices that transform passive viewers into active co-creators of the meaning of a work of art. In a broader context, we are talking about an “educational shift” that builds on the principle of “from viewer to participant”. The goal of this trend is not to improve the accessibility of information to the audience, but to comprehensively transform organizational structures in institutions so that they can create conditions that facilitate engagement, interaction, and co-creation. The study analyses how the Slovak National Gallery (SNG) has redefined its approach to accessibility and public engagement through contextual, constructivist, and participatory pedagogical frameworks. The analysis is based on publicly available SNG Annual Reports (Slovenská národná galéria, n.d.a). Drawing on examples such as the interactive exhibition Take P(art) / Prečo (ume)nie? event, the Meetup SNG programme (2024 – 2025), the outreach project In the Display Window, and the digital platform Web umenia, the article demonstrates how mediation practices have evolved from traditional educational functions toward inclusive and dialogical models of audience interaction. These developments are interpreted in relation to European and national cultural policy documents (e.g., Koncepcia rozvoja kultúry SR 2030, Creative Europe Programme, UNESCO Culture 2030 Indicators), which emphasise participation, accessibility, and the democratisation of culture as key priorities. The paper argues that art mediation in the Slovak context operates not merely as an educational tool but as a socio-cultural practice that bridges artistic production, institutional communication, and civic engagement.

This scientific paper represents a complementary and parallel extension of the initial empirical study “Deepfake: Digital Reincarnation of Art” (Štosel & Spálová, in press). The primary objective of the aforementioned study is to identify the attitudes of fans and followers on social media who responded to marketing and communication activities related to the application of generative artificial intelligence tools of the Deepfake type, in the context of the digital reincarnation of artworks presented within cultural institutions such as The Dalí Museum in Florida, the Danish Museum Fredericia, and the Liptov Museum in Ružomberok. This research study builds upon the same methodological foundations, while focusing on a different empirical dataset. The main aim of the research is to examine the attitudinal responses of participants on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, in relation to three curatorial projects: Ask Dalí, Deepfake: Unstable Evidence on Screen and Interactive Holograms: Survivor Stories Experience of the three cultural institutions The Dali Museum, Museum of the Moving Images and Illinois Holocaust Museum. The output is framed within a qualitative approach, grounded in content-based sentiment analysis. This analytical procedure makes it possible to explore participants’ attitudes as articulated through comments on social media toward the application of generative artificial intelligence tools of the Deepfake type, with particular attention devoted to their use in the digital reincarnation of artworks.

Peter Lančarič (b. 1989) works at the intersection of identity, intimacy, and public space, moving fluidly between analog photography, staged tableau, documentary, video, object, and performance. His long-term series probe how images rewrite self-narrative and relationships: REM frame treats dreams as cartographies of the unconscious; Anything else or will that be all? (2012–2016) binds analog photographs with scanned diary pages into an intimate score of tensions (light/dark, closeness/distance); The Stairs on a Street Corner builds a diaristic black-and-white grammar of vulnerability; Autobiography 1316 expands self-portraiture into cinematically lit reconstructions where props and gesture carry meaning. Exhibition projects such as Until ___ Do Us Part and The Exposition test thresholds of sharing and voyeurism, using architecture and “exhibition light” to question truth, spectacle, and the ethics of looking. In public space he works critically and participatorily – The Exhibition in the Crapper (an illegal intervention during a mall opening) and Special Commemorative Operation (a temporary memorialization of war) confront institutional narratives. A documentary strand – Coma Vigile and Mapping Another Culture – extends his practice toward care, social critique, and living DIY archives. Across projects he maintains a rigorous visual grammar (situational readability, calibrated light/time) and restrained post-production, joining lived rawness with precise editing while asking what images remember, whom they serve, and how much intimacy a public image can bear.

This study examines the evolution of Slovak skateboarding photography through the lenses of everyday aesthetics, spatial performance, and subcultural capital. It explores how photography captures and co-constructs skateboarding as a creative reappropriation of urban space, with a particular focus on how the legibility of the trick and the decisive moment are visually codified. These photographic conventions are historically situated within a broader transformation of visual and media infrastructures. The first section maps the arrival of skateboarding into the Czechoslovak public sphere via newsreels and cinema, emphasizing its visibility in socialist urban contexts. The second part traces the post-1989 formation of communities and media platforms, culminating in the emergence of Boardlife magazine (2004–2009), which established editorial standards and a recognizable visual language. The third section investigates the rise of zine culture (2013–2018) as a grassroots response to the decline of print and as a form of bottom-up archiving. Zines expand the grammar of skate photography through diaristic documentation, spatial mapping, and participatory authorship, thus producing an alternative visual memory of the subculture. By combining visual analysis with cultural theory, the study frames skateboarding photography as both aesthetic practice and social record – a dynamic archive that negotiates between performance, identity, and urban transformation in the face of changing technological and social conditions.

This paper focuses on the representation of identity and social issues in the episodic drama Wednesday, which addresses several taboo and marginalised topics, such as bullying, discrimination, social stigmatisation, and gender and social differences. The research is based on representation theory and other communication concepts that highlight the performative nature of identity and the mechanisms of “othering”. Wednesday uses narrative and characters to initiate conversations about marginalisation and journeys of self-discovery in the context of contemporary social trends and media influences. The paper also emphasizes the importance of the media as a tool for social education, prevention, and for building an inclusive society. It examines specific scenes and narratives from the first and second season that illustrate the dynamics of marginalisation, the struggle for self-definition and the overcoming of social barriers. Additionally, it examines how Netflix’s audiovisual production influences public opinion, promotes social inclusion, and encourages more ethical content production. Contemporary episodic works are an important means of raising social awareness and cultivating empathy within popular culture.