Svetlana Fialová (*1985) explores social phenomena associated with mass popular culture in her current work. These primarily involve shifts in self-representation within the artificially defined framework of a competition. The artist draws on the format of television reality shows, which primarily rely on the intensification of emotions that alternate between moments of regret and sentimentality. The person “performing” these emotions is no longer a professional actor, but rather a motivated volunteer who enters the dramatic arena with ambition—to be seen, to gain something, and to win.

The exhibition title Ružamaxxing refers to the Slovak reality show *Ruža pre nevestu*, which is a adaptation of the American competition *The Bachelor*, broadcast since 2002 on ABC. In the show, a large number of women compete for one man, and the man eliminates individual contestants until the finale, where the ideal couple is formed in front of everyone. This commercial principle of the so-called romantic show reveals a world of intrigue, resentment, and both hidden and overt manipulation. It is a direct social experiment with volunteers motivated by success—whether we understand this to mean a financial reward, the fulfillment of narcissistic self-representation, or the arousal of envy over a perfect partnership. This principle imprints in the subconscious of television viewers a false conception of self-realization as something that initially shocks and is then gradually affirmed as acceptable and ultimately as normal (which redefines “normality”). And it is precisely the ambiguity of so-called “normality” that has long been a central theme in Svetlana Fialová’s work.

The artist uses the medium of graphic art to reflect on ambiguous messages that contain elements of cultural and commercial manipulation. She experiments with the canon of historical self-representation in the genre of portraiture, interweaving it with fictional and authentic figures of the present. The goal is to reveal a certain narcissistic trait that manifests itself in the compositions and poses of those portrayed. In addition to referencing the aforementioned reality show, where “attention” is what sells, the artist also addresses the widespread contemporary phenomenon of selfie-making—the obsessive proliferation of self-portraits and the environments in which people find themselves. An effort to share a sense of both exceptionality and normality at the same time.

Svetlana Fialová exploits this forced naturalness through the expressions of her subjects, but also by overlaying them with colored plexiglass filters (green plexiglass as a green screen) and the overall installation in space, where the emerging connections and juxtapositions of the works foster their critical reflection. Irony is also embedded in the artist’s engagement with the medium itself; she uses only metal matrices as objects that underlie the process of reproduction, but does not actually carry out the process of multiplication (prints on paper) herself. She halts the process of graphic reproduction at the point of the image’s uniqueness, which nonetheless carries within it the irony of the subject matter and a critical deconstruction of the genre. She poses questions related to uniqueness and originality in an era of mass digital and social reproduction. She explores the phenomenon of the transformation of human perception, which is linked to artificially constructed polarities, such as success vs. failure, West vs. East, wealth vs. poverty, and so on.

As an artist from eastern Slovakia, she explores in her work the feeling of being an outsider who spent her entire childhood and adolescence on the periphery of cultural Europe. She views this position as ambivalent—that is, both advantageous and disadvantageous at the same time. She realizes that thanks to her unique experiences—which she overcomes (negates) through her studies and creative work— she also acquires an exceptional critical framework for reflecting on social phenomena that, had she grown up elsewhere, would have remained invisible or insignificant to her. She sees the disadvantage of this position in the socially disadvantaged and uneducated segments of the population, who, due to their local isolation, are susceptible to both external and internal manipulation. From their ranks, then, come the “adventurers of success,” who do not hesitate to expose even their most intimate lives in exchange for a prize—or at least for the sake of “being seen.” This negative phenomenon, typical of the countries of the former Eastern Bloc, is linked to low self-esteem, driven by a capitalist mechanism that preys on and exploits places that are still naive and trustingly uncritical of its negative manifestations.

The artist’s strength lies in her active approach to this situation, through which she uncovers the invisible principles associated with patterns of both global and local manipulation. The title of the exhibition Ružamaxxing is derived from internet slang, in which “maxxing” refers to the escalation of phenomena to the extreme and, at the same time, an obsession with improving established channels of communication, whereby this “optimization” is nothing more than reduction, leveling, and an effort to cultivate a mass prototype of the passive consumer, in whom a dependence on sources of banality, emotion, and fear is fostered. It is nothing more than the dopamine industry, which exploits the trust of people who have not crossed the threshold of critical self-awareness. That is why they succumb to temptations that lead to even greater alienation and self-indebtedness on various levels of life and destructively erode the foundation of a meaningful existence.