Recent work

Ove Pictures search for beauty

What does beauty mean right now, around the world? That’s the question that the Searching for Beauty project is attempting to answer, as it snakes across several different European cities this year.

The exhibition by Eallin directors Michaela Čopíková and Veronika Obertová (Ové Pictures) broke records last summer when it was held at the Parlamentarium.

23,865 visitors came to the visitors’ center of the European Parliament in Brussels to see their interactive installations. Animations are rotated through devices that resemble old-fashioned flipbooks and dioramas, creating stories about the ordinary world and the objects that surround us.

“We got the impression there’s more beauty around us than we give credit for,” says the pair, “and also, that it’s overlooked, and we need to point a finger at it. It’s a warm bath and bubbles suck in a tub, it’s a knitted sweater, it’s a BBQ in the park or a plastic bag caught up in the wind… The exhibited objects represent different ways of understanding beauty.”

23,865 visitors came to the visitors’ center of the European Parliament in Brussels to see their interactive installations.

The exhibition was commissioned to mark the first Slovak Presidency of the Council of the European Union. Following runs in Amsterdam and Linz, it is currently being held at the Slovak Design Centre, Bratislava before moving to Prague.

But the project also has an online incarnation – a web gallery in which the public can take pictures of things that strike them as beautiful, turn them into GIFs, and upload them for the exhibition.

“The beauty of GIFs is in the fact that you can watch a moment isolated in time forever – a piece of a giant puzzle that surrounds us,” the pair said. “In the flood of information, videos, and pictures, we suddenly focus on a single detail. They are great in their imperfection and their compressed quality. We feel closer to them than to flawlessly processed shiny advertising images. GIF is an excellent format for capturing a piece of beauty.”

Find out more about Searching for Beauty here: https://www.searchingforbeauty.eu/