Coming Out by Zuzana Spustova

Dimensions:25h x 40w x 8d cm
Materials: Stainless steel, steel, MDF
Year: 2025

Price on request

What is a mirror? Surveillance or vanity? The truth or an illusion? A reflective surface, full of contradictions. For this exhibition at Etage Projects, titled ‘Soul searching’, designer Zuzana Spustova has created ’40’. A mirror object made out of steel, relatively small and vertically hung, it resembles a small screen with an elusive image. At first glance, the object looks smooth and shiny, but at a closer look you will notice the room around you bending, the reflection of your face slightly twisting. A small ditch in the mirror can be read as a glitch, a fault to be ignored, or an invitation to see the world through a slightly different set of eyes. The title of the object refers to ZS’ age, as turning 40 last year opened her up to the subject of ageing and self-perception in new ways.

’40’ follows ZS’ first mirror series ‘MOTHER’, which she made a year ago. ’MOTHER’ came to be in preparation for the launch of her bracelet Louise at Peder Lund Gallery in Oslo, when the gallery’s director asked her how it feels to be a mother of three. It’s like having three mirrors on you constantly, was her immediate response. And so the mirrors were born.

The mirror objects, however, represent a small leap from Zuzana’s background as a jewellery designer. In some ways, a piece of jewellery is just another mirror. Both are polished pieces of metal: one hanging on the wall, the other around one’s neck, wrist or finger. Both mirror and jewellery reflect some part of you, sometimes through their appearance, other times as something emerging from under the surface. At least that’s the case with ZS, where each of her pieces essentially has been born out of personal, life-changing events.

The mirror is fickle. The object may be static, as the only change is the slight shift in the patina that appears over time. The mirror image, on the other hand, is always changing, requiring the direct attention of the eye: You can’t look away or save it for later. As time passes and life changes, a mirror urges you to consider what you see through your own eyes, not the lens of others.

Just like Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage marks a child’s first step into developing a sense of self, distinguished from their surroundings, the mirror can represent a feeling of a self and a disillusioned self. Just think how we sometimes need to take a step back to see ourselves clearly. The mirror represents a fictional unity as opposed to life’s chaos. In ZS’ mirrors, unity and chaos are intertwined, reflecting off each other like an existential dialogue. When ZS uses words like excitement, naivety and exploration to describe the making of her mirror objects, it is similar to how she felt when she began making jewellery 10 years ago. Perhaps the mirror objects represent her mirror stage, all over again.

Jewellery gets lost, ideas of beauty change, dialogues open up for new ways of seeing, and the mirror captures it all, but only for a passing second. While diamonds last forever, our reflection is always in flux. ’40’ is a fickle self-portrait, inviting the viewer inside. While the artist is absent from the image, the bulk in the mirror works as a quiet presence. She is not there, yet she made her mark.

Materials: Video with iPhone

Year: 2024

Price on request

11 seconds is both a long time and a short time when you are looking at something slow, such as the small bubbles emerging to the surface of the water in Zuzana Spustova’s video work Coming out. Filmed at the Mirror of Venus on the Italian island of Pantelleria, the lake is named after the myth of the goddess of the love and beauty, who would come here to admire her reflection. In the video, bubbles break the otherwise still surface of water. There is little movement in the video, nothing happens, no music. Only the low sound of bubbles — sound of the world.

The video is accompanied by a still image extracted from the footage. Where the video lingers with the slowness of a moment, the images attempts to freeze it into something fixed—yet the suggestion of movement remains. Playing with the tension between movement and stillness, Zuzana creates something at once fleeting and infinite.

The experience of time in a hyper-sensory world was the very inspiration behind this series of images, moving and still. In an era of constant audiovisual overstimulation, where boldness has become the mainstream, Zuzana found herself drawn to moments of stillness. But stillness is not nothingness—it lingers in moments and images that would otherwise be lost to noise. By resisting the speed of life, they also respond to it. When Impressionism emerged in the late 19th century, artists used quick brushstrokes and blurred compositions to evoke the energy and movement of a modern world. Their paintings reflected the fleeting nature of a rapidly changing society. Two centuries later,

Zuzana’s work offers her own visual response to a world in constant motion, as she seeks to hold onto time’s tiniest particles. A sense of discomfort may arise in watching the excruciating slowness of nothing happening—yet that discomfort hold its own form of boldness