Nik Timková is a multimedia and multidisciplinary artist whose activities can be better described and understood by dividing them into three units: first she is the founder and member of the non-collective Björnson and the DJ-dance-performative group The Melancholy of Marissa Cooper; second, she is the curator of Gallery A.M. 180 and an integral member of the eponymous collective A.M. 180 behind the new legendary alternative music festival Creepy Teepee in Kutná Hora; and third, she is active in academia as an assistant professor at the Painting Studio III and chair of the academic senate at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. The first and third categories are closely intertwined, as the collective “… which was an active participant in grassroots institutionalisation at the beginning of the new millennium is now involved in the formation of a new generation both inside and outside academia.” (For more about activities of A.M, visit: https://artlist.cz/prostory/a-m-180-gallery/)
The reason why it makes sense to mention all of these roles and positions at the outset is that they reciprocally shape and impact each other, while also being an outgrowth of all of the artist’s interests and approaches to creativity. In short, they have to be considered together, and in addition they must be perceived within the context of collaboration with other actors. Timková’s neutral interest in a single specific medium, be it drawing, sculpture, video, digital collage, music, performance, textiles or fashion, can be traced back to her early university studies. It eventually permeated not only the creation of art installations, but the artist’s doctoral research into collective practices and the organisation of non-profit space.
Timková first studied New Media with Anna Tretter at the Faculty of Arts of the Technical University in Košice (FU TUKE), but was already determined to focus on objects and installation. After internships in Krakow and at the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (FAMU), she continued her studies at Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design in London, which she followed with a one-year postgraduate programme at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. The Swedish educational system allowed her to concentrate wholeheartedly on sculptural processes for an entire year, and this in turn enabled her to develop her treatment of objects, which she had begun to work on back in Košice, first with textiles then later in London, overlapping into drawing, photography and paper. The openness of the teaching method and the proximity of different artistic disciplines and media in Stockholm inspired her not to close herself off within a single discipline.
A good example would be her early activities, such as curating the irregular seven-part series of Cut Club exhibitions at A.M.180 focusing on the connections between fashion and fine art and their presentation in the gallery space (the first exhibition episode took place in March 2013 and the tenth and most recent in September 2019). Another example would be her participation at the group exhibition Superimpositions (2015) at the Colloredo-Mansfeld Palace, where, in addition to her interest in the deconstruction of clothing in art already seen in the Cut Club exhibition project, she also displayed an interest in the dissolution of the boundaries between fine and applied art (specifically furniture). The larger-than-life size denim palm with batik-stuffed foam on the piano nobile could be a reference to museum furnishings as well as a continuation of her solo three-part Existential Housekeeping (2014–2015), influenced by the post-internet, or an appropriation of The Red Foot by Nicola L. No less important is the fact that Timková collaborated on this exhibition in one of the buildings of the Prague City Gallery together with the siblings Jakub and Anežka Hošek, founders of A.M. 180, with whom she still works on the organisation of musical events as well as on teaching.
The larger-than-life textile objects reappeared at the Polansky Gallery in the monographic exhibition Knife as Outfit (2017), along with digital collages that “seem to come straight from the depths of a gothic Disneyland”. (source: http://polanskygallery.com/exhibitions/knife-as-outfit#img4, accessed 4 July 2023) Just out of interest, Gothic Disneyland was the name of the platform that Timková and Jakub Hošek participated in, which had its visual manifesto on the Tumblr microblog (like many of the other activities referred to above). The reference to the Gothic is no accidental. Timková had studied neo-Gothic art and written her bachelor’s thesis about it. She went on to develop this interest in her master’s thesis Forest Folklore. Her works already displayed a characteristic combination of elements from the online and offline worlds: artisanal materials in opposition to the visual influences of internet culture, with personal interpretations of magic, witchcraft, mythology, feminism and pop culture. All of this was presented under the apparent guise of DIY activities and amateurishly conceived computer effects. An example would be the Bratislava exhibition Burnt Ash School (2019, together with Anežka Hošková) at Zahorian & Van Espen, which resembled the scene of a witches’ coven in the interior of a living room.
2017 was a significant year for Timková. She was a finalist in the Oskár Čepan Award, a competition for Slovak visual artists under forty. In contrast to previous years, the finalists decided not to enter the competition and created a collective installation for the Nitra Gallery. They published an accompanying statement criticising the principle and functioning of the competition. Having come out in favour of dialogue and collaboration with all participants (APART Collective, Katarína Hrušková, Zuzana Žabková and Nik Timková), they became laureates. The event aroused a somewhat tempestuous discussion, both on the Slovak and Czech art scenes. The theme of non-competition had been initiated by the Turner Prize in 2019, to be followed by the Jindřich Chalupecký Award in the Czech Republic a year later.
In 2018, Timková began to work intensively under the Björnson platform. Her very first project, Harvesting Darkness (with Zuzana Žabková and Lucie Svobodová Mičíková),which took place in Prague’s Futura, set the tone. The group’s basic method was the common vision, a practice drawing on the imagination of all participants. In the case of Harvesting Darkness the result was a map of the parallel world Echo around the Futura Gallery, which they then guided visitors around. By means of a feminist questioning of the negative associations of darkness, usually influenced by a traditional humanist perspective, the exhibition presented humankind as a symbiont and citizen of Terrapole, who shared their environment with other beings and nature.
The project continued with the exhibition Harvested Darkness (with the addition of Lucia Kvočáková), which symbolically moved from underground Prague spaces to the impressive backdrop of the light-soaked Košice synagogue. An important part of this exhibition was to be the Karta 86, the first pack of a series of cards that the group would later devote itself to, which was also created on the basis of shared visions. These cards (Čosity), which can be seen within the group project as both a sophisticated yet coherent way of archiving collective work, and as a kind of hybrid of playing and divination cards, also – with their performative interpretation and the publication of a glossary – took a central role in the Jindřich Chalupecký Award exhibition for 2021. The finalists in the 31st year of the competition under the Björnson banner along with Timková were as follows: Zuzana Žabková, Lucie Svoboda Mičíková, Lucia Kvočáková, Tamara Antonijević and Tanja Šljivar.
From this point on, the activities of the group were often to be associated with collective reading. The first ever reading was part of the exhibition at Berlin’s Acud Gallery entitled The Room Without Any Water In It (2019), which also featured readings by Belarusian members Antonijević and Šljivar, as well as excerpts from related texts central to Björnson’s non-collective research. The last project under the aegis of the association before the outbreak of covid was a performative reading at the Belgrade Centre for Cultural Decontamination. The impossibility of meeting because of the virus gave rise to the club Good Night Readers, an on-line evening reading club addressing a wide range of texts, with an emphasis on mysticism, eroticism, feminism and the history of witchcraft. With the gradual disappearance of lockdowns, offline meetings began to be organised, for which the artists deliberately chose venues possessing a highly charged atmosphere. Texts on hydrofeminism were read at Spa AXA, texts dealing with mysticism, ecstasy and censored religious studies were read at the Church of Our Lady Victorious and The Infant Jesus of Prague, the Giant Beds natural formation in the forest near Zdechovice played host to fantasy works, and an exhibition of spiritualism at the Nová Paka City Museum included works about necromancy. The final episode, entitled Dark Angels and inspired by a collection of contemporary lesbian vampire stories, took place in the garden of the Academy of Fine Arts in June 2023 (the first reference to vampire narratives, specifically to the series True Blood, can be traced back to the exhibition in the Košice synagogue). At a certain moment, Good Night Readers split into its secondary form of performative listening. This usually comprises the recitation of various texts combined with audio manipulation (e.g. as part of the accompanying programme of this year’s Bratislava two-part exhibition project Pod týmto zvláštnym slnkom / Beneath this Strange Sun).
Last but not least, as far as sound is concerned, mention must be made of Timková’s DJ name: The Melancholy of Marissa Cooper (inspired by a character from the pop-culture phenomenon of the 2000s, the American TV series The O.C. and the anime The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya). Over time, or rather during one of the Creepy Teepee festivals, the name itself turned into the title of a DF-dance group when Timková was joined by another five performers. A significant domestic event for this group was the music and dance performance at the opening of the exhibition Intimita jako vzdor / Intimacy as Defiance, part of the Move festival, organised by the Centre Pompidou in Paris since 2017 and presented to an audience in Prague for the first time in 2022. The main theme of the exhibition, as its title suggests, was intimacy and its political potential. The performance of the gala evening entitled Dear Dreams, Please Take Me Over (performed by Fergus Johnson, Rene Alejandro Huari Mateus, Zuzana Žabková, Rádio Laude, Štěpán Hlaváček, Vojtěch Hlaváček, Viktor Švolík, Max Shiller and Nik Timková) took place in front of the Veletržní Palác section of the National Gallery with Timková’s already tested “setting” to the rhythms of club music, spectacular lights, high heels and slippery car bodywork. Here, too, everything characteristic of the artist’s wide-ranging work came together: the desire for collective expression and organisation, the transgression of rigid boundaries of all types, an exceptional knowledge of the contemporary context of the wildly dispersed art world (art in the broadest sense of the word), a warmly internalised popular culture, sincere immediacy and a trust in imagination and intuition, with a spiritual step towards the magic of today.
