Ivana Komanická

Born 1973. Ivana Komanická is a philosopher and art theorist. Her theoretical background in a philosophy directed her interest towards contemporary art and curatorial activities. She is mainly interested in ethical responsibility and political intervention: these topics, she says, are present both in theory and art.

She began to study philosophy just after 1989, when she took classes not only at the university, but also at the summer philosophy schools organized by the Jan Hus Foundation, an association created by Western intellectuals to help the dissidents in Czechoslovakia. She continued her studies at the philosophy department of Middlesex University in London, an important centre for a radical philosophy. She got her PhD. in History of Philosophy at the Prešov University, Slovakia. Her academic interest in responsibility turned to the political issues. As a consequence she started her research of a proletarian art in an early avant-garde.

Komanická co-curated exhibitions: “Marika Vicari, Jarmila Džuppová: Natur/e/al” in Krokus Gallery (Bratislava 2009) and “Home Edition. A collective exhibition of the female artists from Slovakia, Czech Republic and Austria” in Central Slovak Gallery (Banská Bystrica, March 2011). Currently she is working on the new project “The Figure of Enemy as the Essence of Politics. Political Art in Slovakia in a Cold-war Era”. Her writing on contemporary art include contributions to the journals “Flash Art“, “Horse-Rider” and Slovak literary and cultural journal “Romboid”, where she also works as a co-editor. She is also a Junior Lecturer in Aesthetics at the Faculty of Visual Arts in Košice. She teaches seminars on phenomenological aesthetics and critical theory.

Lives in Košice.