Slovak-Canadian artist and designer Nicole Beno creates a poster series that places her father’s old analog automotive drawings in tension with the decorative excess of Slovak folklore embroidery, exploring immigrant liminality, cultural hybridity and the space between institutional order and artistic release.
Nicole Beno’s father brought automotive drawings from Communist Czechoslovakia to Canada, to a city built on its industrial output. Those drawings are technical, precise, historically significant. The factories they fed are now empty, the industry changed, the neighbourhoods around them shifting. Beno found the drawings and saw the contrast they carried: the rigour of institutional design pressed against the ornamental abundance of Slovak folklore costume and craft.
Ani Tu Ani Tam, Neither Here Nor There, is the poster series that emerged from that contrast. Slovak embroidery traditions, with their layered visual language and decorative excess, are placed in direct tension with the minimal, modernist precision of the automotive drawings. The busy against the restrained, the handmade folk tradition against the institutionalised technical document, the corporate design office against the artist’s studio. These are not just aesthetic oppositions. They are the conditions of Beno’s life as an immigrant caught between cultures.
“This feeling mirrors my immigrant experience of being caught between cultures,” she says, “a certain hybridity, and never fully belonging to either.”
The phrase itself, ani tu, ani tam, is Slovak for neither here nor there. It speaks to the emotional and cultural liminality that runs through the whole practice. Beno is also teaching her baby Slovak, a language that feels simultaneously more distant and more urgent now that a new generation is being formed. “What language do you dream in?” she asks. It is not a rhetorical question.
Ornamentation is framed throughout the series as a form of rebellion. The clichéd phrases of everyday life, the decorative traditions that modernism dismissed as excessive, the technical drawings that represent a disappeared industrial world: each element resists the flattening that migration and assimilation tend to enforce.
Nicole Beno is a Slovak-Canadian artist and designer working across photography and image-making, blending digital and analog processes in a practice that ranges from orchid petals and gelatin to office supplies and moldy strawberries.
Website: nicolebeno.com Instagram: @nicole_beno
Ani Tu Ani Tam (Neither Here Nor There), 2025. Poster series. Nicole Beno.
