Oskár Čepan

Education: The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Schools of Visual Arts, Copenhagen, Denmark : Master of Fine Arts, 2022–2025 Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (FAMU), Prague, Czech Republic : Bachelor of Arts, Studio of New Aesthetics (Hynek Alt, Jen Kratochvil) 2019–2022

Selected Professional Experience: UKK – Organisation for Artists, Curators, and Art Mediators, Copenhagen, Denmark : Researcher and Events Producer, 05/2023–present Biennale Matter of Art / tranzit.cz, Prague, Czech Republic : Curator Assistant and Researcher, 01/2022–06/2022 Experimental Institute Washed, Trenčín, Slovakia : Program Coordinator and Researcher, 07/2018–02/2023

Solo Exhibition: 2024 : They may rest from their labor; for their deeds follow them!, Q Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark

Selected Group Exhibitions: 2025 : Kunstnernes Efterårsudstilling, Den Frie Udstilling, Copenhagen, Denmark 2025 : Afgang, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, Denmark 2025 : Mite and Tite, Milky Way Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark 2024 : Country roads, take me home, SVETOVA 1, Prague, Czech Republic 2024 : We have everything, but that’s all we have., Q Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark 2023 : How can we be strangers?, Arta Piešťany, Piešťany, Slovakia 2023 : Battery, Medium Gallery, Bratislava, Slovakia 2022 : Paragraph in glyphs, HYB4 Gallery, Prague, Czech Republic 2022 : Plaza Protocol, Mala galerija, Ljubljana, Slovenia 2022 : Divination from a Night Sky Partly Covered by Clouds, Prague City Gallery, Prague, Czech Republic 2022 : Blending and forming, SVETOVA 1, Prague, Czech Republic 2022 : A New View of Matter, Galerie Panel, Prague, Czech Republic 2019 : Washing Season, Stage 1, EIW, Trenčín, Slovakia 2019 : Selection O, Kruhovka Art Festival, Piešťany, Slovakia 2018 : Sony World Photography & Martin Parr, Somerset House, London, United Kingdom 2018 : 21. AMFO, Trenčianske osvetové stredisko, Trenčín, Slovakia

Curatorial Practice 2025 : Observing H., Embassy of Switzerland, Copenhagen, Denmark, co-curated with Seraina Grupp 2022 : What is to Modify???, EIW, Trenčín, Slovakia, co-curated with Nikol Czuczorova 2022 : Do not marry at 18, UMPRUM, Prague, Czech Republic, co-curated with Nikol Czuczorova 2021 : Tear apart, Gallery M. A. Bazovského, Trenčín, Slovakia, co-curated with Nikol Czuczorova 2021 : Tear apart, ARTA Piešťany, Piešťany, Slovakia, co-curated with Nikol Czuczorova

Residency 2026 : Art Hub Residency, Copenhagen, Denmark

Awards and Recognitions 2025 : 15. June Foundation Honorary Award, recipient 2025 : Poul Erik Bech Foundation Art Prize, special recognition 2017 : Sony World Photography Award, shortlisted

Publications 2022 : Divination from a Night Sky Partially Obscured by Clouds, The Role of Photography in the Post-Media Age. ISBN 978-8070101810 2022 : Formation of an Excellent Institution and Self-institutionalization, AMU 2017 : World Photography Organization: SWPA Book. ISBN 978-0957201064

Statement

In my practice, I focus on how the infrastructures of the industrial era persist even after losing their original function, and continue to shape landscape, bodies, and social relations. I am particularly interested in the condition in which industry has not fully disappeared, yet no longer serves its original purpose. It is precisely within this space between operation and decline that infrastructure reveals itself not merely as a technical system, but as a carrier of memory, labour, burden, and collective experience.

This approach grows out of personal experience. I grew up in the Upper Nitra region, where extraction and energy production have long determined both the character of the landscape and the rhythms of everyday life, and I later worked in the maintenance department of the Nováky power plant during its final period. This experience allowed me to understand industry not as an image of the past, but as a living structure composed of routine, repair, waiting, wear, and gradual disappearance. In my work, industrial heritage therefore does not appear as a nostalgic relic, but as an unresolved process in which technology, social reality, and environmental consequences remain entangled.

I work with materials and objects sourced directly from industrial sites, such as ash, steel pipes, welding curtains, and work-related or administrative elements connected to maintenance. I am not interested in them as readymades in a narrow sense, but as materials that carry a specific history of labour, circulation, and decline. When relocated into the gallery, their function changes, but not entirely their weight. In this new context, they become a means of thinking through what remains after industry, and what new meanings these residues may acquire.

Sound is an important part of my practice, and I do not treat it as a supplementary element, but as a way of making infrastructure present on a bodily level. In my installations, sound often emerges directly from the material itself through dripping, friction, vibration, or pressure, so that the viewer encounters industrial space not only visually, but also through rhythm, resonance, and delay. In works such as Have You Ever Seen Coal Burn?, Courtesy to Intervene, or Work Chronicles, I try to make present not only the material remains of industry, but also the invisible labour of maintenance, the tension between function and breakdown, and the ambivalent legacy of environments shaped by pride, dependency, exhaustion, and loss.