Night Shift is Jan Durina’s first show in Hungary at Liget Gallery as well as his first solo exhibition since 2023.

The exhibition deals with the idea of shifting realities, vulnerability, refuge and immersion, all under the watchful eye of nightfall. Leaving behind external expectations, an intuitive process emerges throughout the realisation of the exhibition, bringing together the longing for plainspoken aesthetics, eroticism and tenderness, contemplating care and exhaustion and the closeness of the burdens of the self. Eventually, the night becomes a symbolic territory in which another form of attention can emerge.

The works in the exhibition combine photography, collage, object and hand embroidery, extending the artist’s long-standing experimentation with different media. The automatic embroidery appears on photographs and sheets of paper, often with rhinestones, sequins, feathers and textile elements. The colour composition comes in vibrant and saturated tones, offering a different kind of seeing, one that belongs to the flickering memory of the flickering memory of the nocturnal.

Bringing together recent works created specifically for the exhibition with selected earlier pieces, Durina creates an arc that mirrors the shifting spheres framed by celestial movements. Hence a framework is granted, where the night does not represent a specific timeframe here, rather, it marks a change in possibilities, a passage into a different mode of being. For the overworked and systematically exhausted self, unable to find refuge within the demands of daytime, night remains a territory of withdrawal, intimacy and altered attention bringing into view the conditions that determine how time, labour and care need to be distributed.

A sense of vulnerability is especially present in a series of small sized embroideries on paper depicting imaginary flowers that do not represent existing botanical species, but emerge as emotional entities. Their characteristics are excessive, decorative, strange and candidly exposed.
Blooming at night, when conditions become safe enough to open, they embody both the fragility and persistence of survival. Against a daylight in which flourishing is no longer possible, their unhinged beauty carries traces of environmental grief and despair, while their tenderness refuses to treat vulnerability as something to be ashamed of. I Don’t Want to Be My Own Misery, declared on the embroidered black and white photograph of an uncanny male body, resonates as a refrain of invocation, foreshadowing the possibility of a shift in perspective.

The show carries its own brutality and danger, where grief and loss are not resolved but held, sat with, allowed to unfold on their own terms. Durina’s work does not romanticise the dark, it acknowledges what one is fleeing from as much as what one is fleeing toward. In this sense, the exhibition carries a quiet political charge, the night becomes a site of spiritual transformation precisely because the day has failed to offer one, a rebirth staged in the margins of a system that leaves little room for softness. To seek refuge at night is already a form of resistance, a claim on rest, intimacy and beauty in conditions designed to deny them.

Jan Durina (*1988, Žilina, Slovakia) is a Slovak interdisciplinary artist, musician, curator and researcher based in Prague, and co-founder of the performance collective Romeo & Hellion. His work moves fluidly between photography, drawing, performance and sound, exploring loneliness, vulnerability, and the boundaries between nature, the body and identity, grounded in queer, feminist and ecofeminist thought.

Durina holds a doctorate in Art Research from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, following studies in Intermedia at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava (2014), New Media at the Technical University in Košice (2011).

In 2023, his solo exhibition Weak Season was presented at the Museum of Arts and Design, Benešov, accompanied by a monograph published by *MUD, the same year he was nominated for the FUTURES platform by Fotograf Magazine. His earlier solo show Racing Thoughts was held at Tabačka Gallery, Košice (2022). In 2019, he was named a finalist for the Oskár Čepan Award, Slovakia’s leading prize for emerging artists.

Most recently, Durina’s work has been shown internationally in group exhibitions including Biennale Matter of Art at the National Gallery Prague (2026) and at Ties That Bind, Bienal’25 Fotografia at Ci.CLO Plataforma de Fotografia in Porto (2025) as well as Connections Unbroken, shown at Fotograf Gallery, Prague (2025). He participated in group exhibitions at the Bratislava City Gallery (2024), Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb (2024), KVOST Gallery, Berlin (2024) and the Slovak National Gallery (2021).

His artworks are held in the permanent collections of the Slovak National Gallery, the Gallery of Peter Michal Bohúň, and the Museum of Arts and Design Benešov, among numerous private collections.

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Curated by and exhibition text: Éda Meggyesházi
Graphic design: Dan Friedlaender

The exhibition is supported by the International Visegrad Fund and the Czech Centre Budapest.