Petra Feriancova

Petra Feriancova is a Slovak contemporary artist, writer and curator. She was born in Bratislava, former Czechoslovakia in 1977. She works in the intentions of post-production. The key moment of her work is the conceptualization of her own emotional reactions to the processes of perception and memory as well as an examination of the circumstances under which they are shared. She works mostly with already existing images, texts which she interprets and methodically interchanges. The main aim of this form of manipulation with a pictorial or discursive reference is to provide the spectator with the original affective reaction. Each new realization leans towards a kind of implied connection between the universe of unique personal experience and the impersonal processes of individualization, which is conditioned by civilization, history and culture. Forms, images and vestiges of the fleeting past (family archives, repertoires of historical genres, symbols and discourses) are embraced even in the full awareness that their original meaning has long since degraded or disintegrated, proliferating those areas of indeterminacy which require – even if tentatively, by dint of improvising – being amended and filled with new meaning. Only then, even at the cost of the alienation and distortion of the "original" meaning, may one accept their own version of the world, and by doing so simultaneously open it to others. The process of the socialization or instrumentalization of the subjective, and at the same time, the purely personal interiorization of external contents – the process of mutual alienation as a condition for attributing and renewing meaning – is essentially present as a theme in each and every work by Petra Feriancová, in the form of minor epiphanies, glimpses of understanding, and revelations which cannot be transferred by simple explanation.

Life and work

Petra Feriancová was born in Bratislava on 10 May 1977 to an architect, Doc. Ing. Arch. Dušan Ferianc, and medical doctor, MUDr. Mária Feriancová. She has three daughters: Carlotta Joffe, Marina Torri and Federica Torri. She studied at SSUV from 1991 to 1995, at the department for advertising art, subsequently she was accepted to the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava, which she later left to study at the Accademia delle Belle Arti di Roma, graduating in 2003. She has a PhD. at 2016 in the Department of Intermedia and Multimedia at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava, at the IN Studio.