In Pain Chain, Lucia Tkáčová engages her own biography not as a narrative source but as a material condition of the work. The exhibition emerges from a prolonged proximity to addiction – experienced not directly, but through family relationships shaped by alcoholism – and centers on codependency as a structural, rather than episodic, state. What is at stake is not addiction itself, but its collateral effects: the erosion of boundaries, the inflation of responsibility, the gradual displacement of one’s own life by that of others.
Lucia Tkáčová, “Pain Chain”, installation view at Albumarte, Roma, ph. Giorgio Benni, courtesy Albumarte
Rather than addressing alcoholism as a social problem or representational theme, Pain Chain focuses on its enduring aftermath. The exhibition translates this experience into a constellation of sculptural presences that inhabit space as residues of an unresolved tension. Trauma is neither narrated nor explained; it is sedimented in matter. Autobiography functions here not as confession, but as a testing ground – an attempt to determine how pain can be exposed without being converted into emotional spectacle or redemptive narrative.
Lucia Tkáčová, “Pain Chain”, installation view at Albumarte, Roma, ph. Giorgio Benni, courtesy Albumarte
The sculptural elements – partial bodies, unstable volumes, wounded or softened forms – resist illustrative logic. They do not refer back to specific events, but condense psychic states: attachment, guilt, dependency, the compulsion to save. Familial relations are not depicted but spatially reorganised, becoming a system of forces in which proximity itself generates strain. Meaning does not precede form; it emerges, precariously, through the viewer’s bodily negotiation of space.
Lucia Tkáčová, “Pain Chain”, installation view at Albumarte, Roma, ph. Giorgio Benni, courtesy Albumarte
Within a broader art-historical framework, Pain Chain aligns with feminist practices that have mobilised personal experience as a critical resource, while decisively reworking their premises. Where earlier autobiographical gestures often relied on speech and visibility as emancipatory tools, Tkáčová shifts the emphasis to matter and duration. The body here is not reclaimed as a site of empowerment, but exposed as compromised, contingent and vulnerable. Codependency appears not as a psychological trait, but as a structure that precedes the subject, shaping time, gesture and relation.
Lucia Tkáčová, “Pain Chain”, installation view at Albumarte, Roma, ph. Giorgio Benni, courtesy Albumarte
The exhibition design amplifies this position. There is no linear path, no interpretive guidance, no affective relief. Viewers move through a space that withholds explanation, producing a condition of disorientation that mirrors the internal logic of dependency itself. In doing so, Pain Chain raises an ethical question central to contemporary art: how can the pain of others be shown without being aestheticised or consumed? Tkáčová answers not by protecting the viewer, but by refusing identification altogether. Although rooted in an autobiographical urgency, Pain Chain offers no promise of healing. The process is exposed as incomplete, resistant and at times untenable. Dependency is not framed as something to be overcome, but as a condition that leaves durable traces, continuing to structure bodies and behaviours even in the absence of its object.
Lucia Tkáčová, “Pain Chain”, installation view at Albumarte, Roma, ph. Giorgio Benni, courtesy Albumarte
The exhibition’s critical force lies precisely in this refusal of closure. There is no catharsis, no compensatory narrative, no horizon of resolution. Pain Chain does not solicit empathy, but endurance: endurance of proximity, of ambiguity, of the desire to turn pain into story. Autobiography does not explain the work; rather, the work returns – through its material severity – what in the experience of dependency cannot be stabilised, redeemed or resolved. The exhibition is produced with the support of public funding from the Slovak Art Council and the Slovak Institute in Rome, in collaboration with PILOT (Bratislava) and AlbumArte.
Info:
Lucia Tkáčová. Pain Chain
curated by Lýdia Pribišová
4/12/2025 – 20/02/2026
AlbumArte
Via Flaminia, 122 – Roma
www.albumarte.org
Micol Di Veroli (Rome, 1976) is an art historian, critic and independent curator. She is a member of AICA – International Association of Art Critics. Since 2010 she has been curator of Glocal Project Consulting and collaborates with several international museums creating projects aimed at promoting and supporting Italian art abroad.
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