The Oskár Čepan Award is a prestigious prize for visual artists working in Slovakia under the age of 40, which has long reflected current trends in contemporary art and social themes. As part of the festival, we'll present the award's landmark 30th edition, its laureates, and share more about the upcoming exhibition.

This year's exhibition focuses on questions of collective memory, post-industrial landscape, cultural identity, and the infrastructures that shape our environment and everyday life. Through post-socialist residues and contemporary cultural imaginaries, the laureates' work examines how political, economic, and social systems persist in the form of material, spatial, and affective layers — layers that simultaneously demand constant reassessment, critical questioning, and radical transformation.

The program will include a presentation of works and a discussion with this year's laureates, Andrej Kiripolský and Natália Šimonová. The work of laureate Norbert Kuki will be presented by curator Doris Sisková, who will also moderate the discussion and has curated the Oskár Čepan Award 2026 exhibition.

Doris Sisková
Curator and cultural worker based in Bratislava. She is a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava (Studio of Space) and the Design Academy Eindhoven (The Critical Inquiry Lab). During her studies, she focused on interdisciplinary research at the intersection of design, philosophy, and social critique. In her practice, she engages with the medicalization of emotions, digital identity, tactical passivity, and the relationship between the human body and ecosystems in an era of permacrisis. In 2024, she was nominated for the Gijs Bakker Award for her project New Weird Hope. Her work has been presented at (selection): Dutch Design Week, International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam, Melted Film Festival, Fest Anča, Kunsthalle Bratislava, and VUNU Gallery. She is the author and curator of the exhibitions DOE vs. Siren: On Metabolization & Shapeshifting (Medium Gallery, Bratislava, 2025), Swarming Tongues (Favu Gallery, Brno, 2026), Erotics of Extinction (SKC, Bratislava, 2026), and the Oskár Čepan Award 2026 (Turiec Gallery, Martin, 2026).

Andrej Kiripolský
Slovak visual artist (b. 2000, Bystričany, Upper Nitra) based in Copenhagen. He is a graduate of the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen and the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. His work moves between sculpture, installation, and audiovisual formats. He draws on Upper Nitra, a region long shaped by coal mining, the energy industry, and their social consequences. In his work, he traces how industrial history is inscribed into environments, materials, everyday situations, and collective memory. His recent projects include Have You Ever Seen Coal Burn? at Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen (2025), the solo exhibition They may rest from their labor; for their deeds follow them! at Q Gallery in Copenhagen (2024), and Country roads, take me home at SVĚTOVA 1 in Prague (2024). He is the recipient of the 15 June Foundation's Honorary Prize 2025 and a current resident at Art Hub Copenhagen.

Natália Šimonová
Painter (b. 1995, Žiar nad Hronom), who lives and works in Prašice near Topoľčany. She completed her painting studies at the Academy of Arts in Banská Bystrica in 2022 in the Open Painting Studio under Rastislav Podoba, and completed her doctoral studies under Jiří David in 2025. She was a laureate of the Painting of the Year – VÚB Foundation competition in 2020. In the Strabag Artaward International 2021, she reached the finals and received a Recognition Award. In 2024, she was a finalist for the Novum Foundation Award, and in the same year became one of the laureates of the Púpava development competition. In 2025, she received the Slovak Rectors' Conference Award for Art. In her work, she engages with collective and personal memory, thematically depicting motifs of urban architecture and its structures, such as playgrounds from the socialist era. Her work can be classified as so-called expanded painting, characterized by extending beyond the boundaries of the painting medium through spatial installation, communication between paintings and space, and active engagement of the viewer. She uses combinations of classical and non-classical media (charcoal, pastel, acrylic, oil, frottage, collage, décollage), and especially rust, which is characteristic of her work.