CT / Gallery / Nik Timková: you want this place to be everything

The solo exhibition of Nik Timková at Kostka Gallery enters us into a tightly composed scenographic situation in which reading and dreaming overlap with an alert perception of social meanings. The architecture of the installation deliberately blurs the boundary between interior and exterior and creates a magical yet restful environment whose centre of gravity is a large carpet printed with a digital collage – the central work that transforms the plane of an imaginary interior into an enchanted reading room with a domestic feel, which, together with simple furnishings, invites immersion in the artist’s curated poetic texts. Here the haptic dimension carries meaning: the textile objects address not only the eye but also the skin and muscle memory. Their seams,  fibres and substance become legible, and touch rewrites, confirms and questions meaning within them. Timková has long developed the deconstruction of clothing toward textile architecture and design at a larger-than-life scale, connecting the material corporeality of cloth with sculptural and scenographic functions; she interweaves digital collage with pop-cultural, new-gothic, esoteric and manga iconographies, drawing on DIY and post-internet strategies of appropriation. A prominent role is played by reclaimed denim, a material she has engaged for years. It carries the memory of an originally working-class fabric that Timková employs as sculptural matter – roughly patched objects, pictorial grounds, a readymade of monumental “macho” jeans in a Y2K vein, or the surface of oversized textile hands – pursuing an ironic, subversive line against our habits of seeing and the fetishes of design.

A denim trio of cats, inspired by the artist’s own pets, is stripped of mere cuteness and entrusted with the function of liminal guardians of reading rituals. The walls are adorned with a series of bobbin-lace works on denim supports. This old technique of hand-interlacing threads departs from traditional geometric patterning and turns toward contemporary iconography – from the wistful “emo face” of the noughties and a ball of yarn with a playing cat to a medievally morbid dish bearing the eyes of St. Lucy – culminating in a DIY-fabricated lace pillow serving here as the base for a bobbin-laced pop-cultural tag, “True Love.”

Thus you want this place to be everything weaves, from the long-built layers of the artist’s works and sources, a polysemous collage in the form of a magical yet comfortably appointed oracle that can transform into countless variants of itself according to our wishes. Throughout the exhibition, the installation will be complemented by reading-performative sessions by the Björnsonova collective, with whom the artist shares a feminist and ecofeminist orientation and a ritual engagement with text and the body.

Nik Timková (b. 1986, Košice) is a Slovak multimedia artist based in Prague. She works fluidly across new media, installation, sculptural procedures and textiles. She studied at the Faculty of Art at the Technical University of Košice; completed her MA at Central Saint Martins in London; continued in a postgraduate programme at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm; and is currently completing a PhD at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague.

Since her early projects Timková has explored the deconstruction of clothing in art – testing new approaches to integrating textile practice within the gallery, for example through larger-than-life textile objects. She also works with digital collages that remix pop-cultural, vampiric and gothic aesthetics. More broadly, her practice frequently adopts DIY procedures and draws on web platforms (in the past, for instance, Tumblr), post-internet and subcultural aesthetics. Her works often emerge through shared authorship (at times in tandem with Zuzana Žabková, at others with the Hošek siblings or within the Björnsonova collective) and assume the character of collective performative interventions. Since 2015 she has collaborated with the Björnsonova “non-collective” on feminist and ecofeminist themes. Its other members include artists and theorists Zuzana Žabková, Lucie Svoboda Mičíková, Lucia Kvočáková, Tamara Antonijević and Tanja Šljivar. Part of the laureate cohort of the Jindřich Chalupecký Award in 2021 and included in the third Biennale Matter of Art in 2024, the group grounds its performative approach in ritual reading, embodiment and witch-iconography, articulating a feminist and socially critical stance beyond traditional institutional frames.
In 2017, Timková was among the collectively awarded finalists of the Oskár Čepan Award. Her installations, textile objects, digital collages and performances function as a magical space open to shared imagination, play with identities, humour and protest. The interrelation of body, object and ritual is among the defining features of her work.

Nik Timková: you want this place to be everything
15. 8. – 5. 10. 2025
Kostka Gallery

Opening: 14. 8. 2025 

Curator: Ján Gajdušek
Architecture / Construction: Vojtěch Hlaváček (Studio acht ateliers) 
Production: Nikol Hoangová
Graphic Design: Jakub Kučera