Photosyntéza – One World, One Landscape: Beáta Kolbašovská (SK) and Lorena Solís Bravo (PE/NL)
Photosyntéza connects new media art with current environmental themes. During the two-month residency, the Dutch artist Lorena Solís Bravo and the Košice artist selected from an open call, Beáta Kolbašovská, will create a joint new media artwork. Using innovative technologies, the piece will reflect on the ecological challenges of the Eastern Slovakia region.
Creative Industry Košice continues its support for artists focused on new media, thereby fulfilling the mission of its membership in the UNESCO Creative City of Media Arts network.
The residency was created in collaboration with Creative Industry Košice and the Dutch centre for media culture, IMPAKT, which selected the Dutch artist Lorena Solís Bravo. The workspace will be provided by the Košice residency program KAIR, and the joint multimedia artwork will be exhibited in the Šopa Gallery. The opening vernissage will take place during the week of the Art&Tech Days festival, November 24 – 29, 2025.
BEÁTA KOLBAŠOVSKÁ is a Slovak new media artist whose work spans site-specific installations, live visuals, performances, and 3D animation. As founder of the visual collective Nano VJs and POMA (Platform of Open Media Art), she focuses on creating and presenting media art in public spaces. She frequently collaborates internationally to produce complex multimedia works. By harnessing ephemeral moments, she forges meaningful interactions between her art and its participants. Each audiovisual installation is meticulously calibrated to resonate with its location’s unique atmosphere. She presents her projects worldwide, inviting deep engagement with her explorations of slowness and environment.
She has performed and exhibited in recent years at Athens Digital Art Festival, Athens, GR (2025), Schafhof – European Art Forum Upper Bavaria, Freising, DE (2025), ON SCREEN FESTIVAL, Vienna, AU (2024), 29th Slavonian Biennial, Museum of Fine Arts in Osijek, HR (2024), IDKF, International digital art festival, Stuttgart, DE (2024), Simultan festival, Timisoara, RO (2024), Prototyp festival, Brno, CZ (2024) and others.
LORENA SOLÍS BRAVO is a Peruvian artist based in Amsterdam. Their practice merges together scientific research, speculative thought, and poetry, giving shape to films, performances, sculptures, and texts.
Through their work, they explore and deconstruct the concept of identity within the modern-colonial subject by examining its symbiotic relationships with other species, proposing a dissolution of the boundaries between the human and the non-human. In these intersections, they invite the viewer to experience the world as a body in constant transformation and interconnection.
Solís Bravo employs a situated and collaborative methodology, frequently collaborating with scientists and biologists. They use technologies such as Micro CT scanner and electron microscopy, combining them with alternative narratives. Their practice stems from a critique of how science has been historically constructed and understood through Western hegemonic thought, aiming to rethink it from a decolonial perspective, opening it up to other ways of knowing and sensing.
Their approach is grounded in rigorous research, which then expands into the poetic, the dreamlike, and the sensorial.
The residency program is supported using public funding by the Slovak Arts Council. The Slovak Arts Council is the main partner of this project. The project was also supported by the City of Košice and the Košice Self-Governing Region.
Project Photosyntéza was supported by the Dutch Embassy in Slovakia.
