About 

Sona Smedkova is a Czech multidisciplinary artist based in Galway, Ireland. Smedkova gained First-class Honours in Master of Arts in Creative Practice at the School of Design and Creative Arts, ATU, Galway. In the fourth year of her undergrad studies, she was an integral member of the student-led curating team for an exhibition for GMIT contemporary art graduates Not a Degree Show, Printworks, funded by Galway City Arts Council. She was awarded an Agility Award by the Arts Council of Ireland in 2021. In early 2022 she became a member of the Board of Directors at 126 Artist–Run Gallery and the same year she was a curator of an exhibition A Remix of Change at 126 Gallery as part of the Galway International Arts Festival. Smedkova’s work was recently exhibited in a group show DÉAD in Transmediale, Berlin under the Creative Pathways Programme, funded by Irish Embassy Berlin and Goethe Institute Ireland. The show is now travelling to Dublin and will be launched as part of the Culture Night at Goethe Institute Ireland.

Identity, in-between spaces, and models of disruption are investigated in Smedkova’s practice through a nexus of cultural displacement and spatial reasoning within abstract paintings. An array of media is arranged in installations and augmented in overlapping systems of digital and physical artefacts to create a sense of entanglement. Her research and creative processes are an interplay between migration studies and the political regimes of Eastern Europe.