Denisa Tomková, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the  Department of Theory of Art and Artworks at the Faculty of Humanities Charles University in Prague. Her monograph Empowering Aesthetics: Contemporary Art from Post-socialist Central Europe is forthcoming from Bloomsbury press (2025). 

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She was a Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Art History at the Centre for Audiovisual Studies of the Academy of Performing Arts (FAMU) in Prague. She was the Curator of Editorial Programming at Kunsthalle Bratislava, Slovakia (2022-23). She holds an MSc in Modern and Contemporary Art: History, Curating and Criticism from The University of Edinburgh and PhD in Visual Culture from the University of Aberdeen (2019). Her PhD research focused on socially engaged art from the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland.

 

Denisa Tomková, as the curator of Kunsthalle Bratislava's editorial programming  between 2022 and 2023, prepared the Critical Thinking Series project, the aim of which was to expand the concepts proposed by the Kunsthalle's exhibition programme with additional critical discursive thinking in the form of essays by international scholars (Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, Sophie Lewis, Legacy Russell, Jack Halberstam, Sara Ahmed, Lola Olufemi, Grant Kester, or Alena Alamgir, among many others). The texts have been translated into Slovak for the first time, making these concepts accessible to readers who do not necessarily read in English. A printed anthology Critical Thinking Series: Wandering Concepts (2023, ISBN 978-80-973924-2-0), edited by Tomková, was published to accompany the project.

In 2023, Tomková curated (together with Kvet Nguyen) the first group exhibition of art of the Vietnamese diaspora in Slovakia, entitled Nhớ: The Space Between One End and the Other, at the Kunsthalle Bratislava.  Previously, during her stay in Copenhagen, Tomková, as a curatorial and publications research fellow at SixtyEight Art Institute (2021/2022), prepared an exhibition project entitled The Book as Art and Vision by Jap Sam Books, accompanied by a public talk with the publisher. The Dutch publishing house Jap Sam Books aims to create a multidisciplinary approach and cross-boundary thinking that was reflected in the art books on display.

Between 2019 and 2021, Tomková worked for the European Roma Institute for Art and Culture (ERIAC) in Berlin as a researcher, curator and project coordinator. As a researcher at ERIAC, she conducted comprehensive mapping of Roma tangible heritage in museums and galleries in Europe and beyond. In 2020, she curated an exhibition entitled Performing the Museum, which argued that art created by artists of Roma origin represents a 'blind spot' in our institutions.

As a curator, she worked on the Secondary Archive project, an online platform dedicated to the work of women artists from Central Eastern Europe. In addition to working directly with women artists from the region to prepare their statements for the archive, Tomková contributed a research essay, ‘Romani Feminism in Works of Roma Women Artists’ (2021). 

Between 2015-2018, she was a member of the international research project ‘Comparing WE’s. Cosmopolitanism. Emancipation. Postcoloniality’ based at the University of Lisbon.