Jana Zatvarnická

Jana Zatvarnicka’s artistic practice explores the entanglement of human and non-human forms through ecofeminism, ritual, and material transformation. Working across painting, installation, and performative processes, she creates hybrid bodies that dissolve boundaries between plant, soil, memory, and the human body. Through the use of organic and unstable materials such as rust, wax, hair, gold, pigments, and found matter, her works function as sites of imprinting—holding traces of touch, decay, gesture, and time.

 

Drawing from narratives of witchcraft, botany, archival research, and the transhistorical memory of the female body, she investigates how systems of power shape relationships between gender, ecology, knowledge, and embodiment. Her practice approaches painting as both material experiment and speculative form of research, where myth, ritual, and organic transformation become tools for reimagining human and more-than-human coexistence. Through symbolic and sensory languages, she reflects on cycles of vulnerability, healing, and interconnectedness beyond anthropocentric structures.

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Jana Zatvarnická’s research includes work at Klassik Stiftung Weimar (Germany) and The Natural Herbarium Archive at the University of the West Indies (Trinidad and Tobago). She is also the founder and editor of The Silver Moon, an independent magazine focused on art, ritual, ecology, and transhistorical narratives of the body. Alongside her visual practice, Jana Zatvarnická is also active as a musician and vocalist in an experimental hardcore doom band. Selected residencies include A.I.R. Muhu Island (Estonia), Hydra_Pace, Ljubljana (Slovenia), Alice Yard (Trinidad and Tobago), Budapest Galéria (Hungary), and Residency Unlimited, New York (USA, 2025). Awards include the VUB Painting Prize (Slovakia, 2019), Stiftung Kunstfonds Neustart Kultur Grant (Germany, 2022), Nadácia NOVUM Award (Slovakia, 2024), and finalist position for the STRABAG Art Award (Austria, 2022).