Šimon Chovan

Šimon Chovan, born 1994, Banská Štiavnica, Slovakia, is a visual artist currently living between Dekýš and Amsterdam. He studied at the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam, KASK School of arts Gent and the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava. His recent solo exhibitions include Dendrites & Tissues at the TIC Gallery in Brno (2024) or The New Wounded at the Holešovická Šachta in Prague (together with Laura Gozlan, 2023). He has also participated in a number of group exhibitions: Staffordshire St in London, Kunsthalle Wien, EXILE Vienna, Kunsthalle Bratislava, Kustverein Eisenstadt, Loods 6 Amsterdam, Greenfield Project Space London or Tranzit Bratislava. Recently, he has also exhibited frequently in the Czech Republic, for example in Meetfactory, Hraničár Gallery, the Lidice Art Collection, and the Regional Gallery in Zlín. Chovan´s work is characterized by its material sensitivity, in which organic and inorganic substances meet with a distinctive ochre pigment.

Last year, he was part of a research project concerned with the plans for lithium mining in Cínovec, at the border of Czechia and Germany. As one of the results of his research, he collected mica minerals containing lithium. He also obtained a residue from recycled electric car batteries from a research group at the local UJEP university. The sources he has collected couldn't be more contrasting—on one hand, the raw and untouched lithium, carrying a daunting potential to attract the mining industry with harmful effects on the local environment, and on the other hand, the leftover mixture of paper, zinc, and copper from recycled batteries made with lithium, likely sourced from Chile. While this may seem geographically distant, each of us carries a piece of it in our phones and everyday devices. During the residency, he would like to explore ways of working with these materials—both conceptually and practically.