Slovakia Removes National Theatre and Gallery Heads in ‘Arts Crackdown’

When Slovakia’s minister for culture fired the director of the country’s oldest and most significant theatre last Tuesday, the numerous reasons she cited included “political activism,” an alleged preference for foreign over Slovak opera singers, and an incident involving a crystal chandelier.

Matej Drlička’s dismissal from the Slovak National Theatre was followed by the removal of the Slovak National Gallery’s director the next day. Drlička claims the real motive is a concerted crackdown on artistic freedom and a systematic attack on state institutions under the populist prime minister Robert Fico.

“The explanations that [culture minister] Martina Šimkovičová listed are a compilation of complete lies,” Drlička told the Observer. “The only reason is that her government doesn’t want culture to be free.”

Fico, who reclaimed power for a fourth term as prime minister last October, is governing in a coalition with the nationalist SNS and the centre-left Hlas parties. His Smer party won the parliamentary elections, pledging to halt military aid to Ukraine.

The 59-year-old politician made his first public appearance last month since surviving an assassination attempt on 15 May, where he criticized the supposed expansion of progressive ideologies and the west’s stance towards Russia.

One of his most contentious appointees has been SNS culture minister Šimkovičová, a 52-year-old former TV presenter whose media career ended over anti-refugee social media posts. In 2018, she was nominated for “homophobe of the year” by the Slovak human rights institute Inštitút ľudských práv.

One of Šimkovičová’s initial actions in office was to restore cultural ties with Moscow, which had been suspended after Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

She has since dismissed the board of the Slovak Fund for the Promotion of the Arts, which allows cultural organizations to apply for funding without going through the ministry. She also withdrew funding for Bratislava’s brutalist House of Culture and fired the heads of the National Library and children’s museum Bibiana.

Her proposed bill to dissolve the public service broadcaster RTVS and replace it with a new entity under full government control led to mass protests in June.

“Alarm bells went off when Šimkovičová took over the culture portfolio last autumn,” said Albin Sybera, a fellow at the central European policy thinktank Visegrad Insight. “What we saw again last week is that those fears were not unfounded. We are seeing a spreading of radical rightwing positions into Slovakia’s mainstream discourse.”

Both long-serving National Gallery director Alexandra Kusá and National Theatre director Drlička enjoyed strong international reputations. Drlička’s dismissal came just days after receiving the French Order of Arts and Letters at the rank of knight by France’s culture minister Rachida Dati.

Drlička stressed that his theatre’s role included “showing the blind spots of our history,” but insisted he never expressed his political views in his role as director. “I am a manager,” he clarified.

In her press statement, Šimkovičová claimed Drlička had “seriously damaged the reputation” of the theatre by not punishing those responsible for a crystal chandelier that fell onto the stage during a children’s event in June. Drlička said an employee had been disciplined for the incident, in which no one was hurt.

Comparisons have been drawn between the Fico government’s cultural clampdown and Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán’s systemic crackdown on diversity in media, theatre, film, and publishing. “This kind of thing is not only happening in Slovakia,” Kusá told ARTnews.

Drlička suggested the dismissals might be driven more by spite than strategy. “It’s possible that we could go down the Hungarian route and end up with a very obedient cultural field,” he told the Observer. “But if Hungary is the goal, these are not the right people in charge. They are not that smart.”

The government has yet to appoint a successor to lead the prestigious Bratislava theatre. “They haven’t proposed an alternative vision. To say that these people have a grand vision for Slovak culture would be to seriously overestimate them.”

As a successor to the ousted National Gallery director Kusá, the culture ministry has presented a business manager with no track record in the arts, Anton Bittner. He has been described as a “manager and expert in stabilizing organizations and their development.”

On Friday, Slovak media reported that Bittner had previously worked as a project manager at Penta, an investment group involved in one of Slovakia’s largest corruption scandals, though he is not accused of financial misconduct. Outside his managerial activities, the news outlet aktuality.sk reported, the new gallery manager offered services in tao healing, a traditional Chinese medicine.

“The minister claims that she is restoring normalcy to Slovakia,” said Sybera. “But the figures she is introducing to the culture sector seem to tell a different story.”

Source: The Guardian, ARTnews, Observer, Visegrad Insight