Selected by Noorderlicht: Emma Straňáková
Every year, Noorderlicht chooses one or two recent graduates from Academie Minerva and the Frank Mohr Institute who work with photography, lens-based media or something close to it. We look for experiment, urgency and a personal take on how image, society and technology relate to one another. The makers receive €500 and a place in a Noorderlicht exhibition, to give them a helping hand as they move from art academy to professional practice.
This year we chose Emma Straňáková. Emma graduated cum laude from Academie Minerva last summer with her graduation work Sorela Archív. In our gallery she is turning it into a new installation, made especially for this space, and showing new work.
For Sorela Archív, Emma sought out people who lived through communism in what is now Slovakia and Hungary. She sat down with them and listened, as a grandchild would, to everything they wanted to tell her. They then let her document their photo albums. She printed the photographs on cotton and sewed them by hand into tiny folds, a technique called smocking. A mother’s eyes disappear behind a stitch, and suddenly a hand comes forward. Stitch by stitch, 35 meters of fabric became roughly 17 meters.
Emma grew up in the Hungarian minority in Slovakia and now lives and works in the Netherlands. She also won the Minerva Award for Fine Art, was featured in Best of Graduates at Galerie Ron Mandos, and is a Master/Apprentice at Kunstpodium T in Tilburg in 2026/27.