EN_Hydra’s heads - Rome Gallery Weekend

10/04/2026

-

13/06/2026

Exhibitions

rgw 2026

Petra Feriancová

Hydra’s heads

Gilda Lavia Gallery (Rome) is pleased to host Hydra’s heads, solo show of the artist Petra Feriancová which will open on Thursday April 9 at 6 pm. Feriancová’s work operates at the intersection of photography, sculpture, and installation, frequently drawing from personal archives and heterogeneous materials to reorganize them into non-linear structures. On this occasion, the artist invites the audience into a physical and intellectual experience, stimulating a reflection on memory, mimicry, and the stratification of matter—the long-standing core of her research. The heart of the exhibition is a site-specific installation that compels the visitor into immediate physical interaction.

Upon entering the gallery space, the perception of stability wavers: the work is not an object to be observed, but rather living matter that “occurs” beneath one’s feet. The artist transforms the floor into a fragile and unstable territory, where the public is called to navigate as if upon a simmering mass of lava or clay, in search of a precarious equilibrium. In a text written for the exhibition, Feriancová herself describes the work as follows: “Entering the gallery, you stop. You stop because what lies beneath your feet is unstable and, at the same time, fragile. It is not solid ground: it is living matter happening beneath your steps.

” In this dimension, history is not a straight line but a vertical development. As the artist emphasizes, “the planet increases in layers”; and in Rome, this stratification becomes self-evident: one leans over the past as if over a museum showcase, discovering that which has been buried to become eternal. The exhibition path explores the inevitability of the “collective concept” and the regenerative capacity of matter. Through the use of organic and synthetic materials, Feriancová investigates the fragility of bodies and the immortality of art. Much like the mythological Hydra, which regenerates with every wound, the exhibition reflects on the lifespan and on memory that stratifies vertically, mirroring the millennia resting beneath the soil of Rome.

Biography of the artist Petra Feriancová (1977 Bratislava, Slovakia) lives and works in Bratislava. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava which she left for the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, graduating in 2003. She holds a PhD since 2016 in the Department of Intermedia and Multimedia at AFAD in Slovakia. In 2013 she represented Slovakia and the Czech Republic at the 55th Venice Biennale with the project “An Order of Things”. In 2011 she took part in the residency at the ISCP in New York and in 2010 received the Oskar Cepan award for young artists organized by the FCS Foundation, Foundation for a Civil Society.

Her work is in the permanent collections of the Slovak National Gallery, GMB Gallery of the City Bratislava, Art Collection Telekom, AGI Verona, European Investment Bank EIB, Fondazione Morra Greco, Palazzo Collicola Spoleto, Villa D’Este Tivoli, Collezione Planeta Palermo, the Mario Testino Collection, and the Lawrence Benenson Collection.