Barni, Selva: Creator 2010

Petra Feriancova Creator is a subtle work about generation and appropriation, about the human need to manipulate nature, beauty and life. This archive belonged to the artist s ornithologist grandfather who, between 1948 and 1962 worked with other breeders from Eastern Europe and Russia on the creation of new species of pigeons. This collection of 85 original images is the result of their experiments and outcomes. Each image is the evidence of an  improvement or a mistake, each one with annotated measurements, dates and comments on the developments of the tests.

Bruschi, Valentina: Gran Tour 2002

Petra Feriancova references both the real and the fictional environments in her photographic work, which is concerned with exploring the territory between memory, perception and representation. Her approach to the photographic image is not formal and the technical aspects are secondary to the narrative which is usually constructed in a second moment. The first step is the “collection” of images, snapshots taken with a disposable camera which the artist then develops and selects. The images are then presented on their own or combined in a series.

Comuzzi, Eva: Tales and Poems 2010

The rain before it falls by Jonathan Coe was the first reference that came to my mind when I got to know the work of Petra Feriancova. A melancholic and delicate novel in which the protagonist, Rosamund, having arrived to the end of her life, registers a testament that meticulously describes twenty pictures to a blind girl. Twenty slides of a suffered life, to give a past to someone who has never had it, to give a form to something that she doesn’t know, and that she has never had a chance to see.

Feriancova, Petra: Pythagoras Descent 2009

Herodotos mentions Pythagoras in connection with an underground inhabitance, so if we wanted to widen the scope of the title, it could pretty well be a “Pythagoras’ descent” (according to Herodotos). The Latin expression is “descensus”. I´ve studied it again in Herodotos, which Elliade refers to. He mentions it as Thracian or Barbaric specifics, whereas he also admits that Pythagoras described and practiced it himself. Greek mythology is full of descending into underworld- or Hades, or isolation from the community (Zalmoxis described by Elliade was both slave and scholar of Pythagoras).

Gavulová, Lucia: Postscriptum To Childe Harold's Pilgrimage 2011

“The aim of life is to feel. To feel that we exist, even in pain. It is the “challenging emptiness”, that compels us into game - into war - into travel - to any action, as long as it is strongly lived through, and its main allurement is the excitement, which is its integral part.”

Gavulova, Lucia: Pythagoras Descent 2009

Petra Feriancova’s exhibition Pythagoras’ Descent is marked – characteristically – by a certain radicalness, demonstrated in various aspects. This lies partly in the strongly subjective or even intimate nature of its subject, in its production, and finally in wide range of affect and intellectual engagement offered therein.

Ivaniskinova, Michaela: By The Way 2006

It seems that nowadays one can come across machismo in places one would least expect – at contemporary art exhibitions, for example, and particularly those deemed unofficial. As with all true heroes, the contemporary artist’s life is devoted to serving a higher purpose (art), which includes enduring one or two misfortunes (such as lack of public interest) along the way. The contemporary artist is a person of action rather than words, whose actions (exhibitions and other public displays) betray clearly formulated opinions, however.

Kivland, Sharon 2010

It is a matter of forgetting as much as one of remembering or of causal retrieval in the works of Petra Feriancova. The past is an evasive and imprecise location, slipping between the places of private experience and public associations or encounters. Our subjectivity is always a trajectory (perhaps rather a dérive or even a dialectic) between the universal and the particular and back, a looping, folding journey, which produces a fiction about the truth of experience and memory.

Pokorny, Marek: Seclusion 2009

Regardless of how ‘alternative’ or anachronistically ‘trash’ Petra Feriancová’s recent exhibition may seem to be in terms of its appearance – at a time when the Czech and Slovak art scenes have finally discovered the significance of form and precise presentation – her concept is richly structured, even orchestrated, one might say.

Pribisova, Lydia 2011

Petra Feriancová (born in 1977 in Bratislava, lives and works in Bratislava) uses video, photography, texts, installations and audio recordings to work with material accumulated in her private life. She contextualises civil video recordings, documentary photographs from archives of those close to her, magazine clippings and love letters in a system with personal rules, in which the identity of people and places doesn't matter, but the relations between them, their mingling, disappearance and emergence do.

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