/millionaires for a better world/
In May lest year the media briefly exposed a Ietter of Subcomandante Mar-cos addressed to the Inter Milan football club, inviting the latter to Chiapas to play a match with the local team of the EZLN (Zapatista National Libe-ration Army)…
Read moreCorporations or corporate systems are symptomatic features of the globalized post-industrial world, and in its social connotations this theme is also very topical for artists themselves.
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Staged photographs are not windows upon the world. They are windows on one of its many possible variants – upon a world in which it is possible to stage things, that is, to adjust them in such a way that the instrumenty of mediation (apparatus) capture them in the order ascribed to them…
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A staged shot of spilt milk, or of flying bullets. The author’s self-portrait with an Arab scarf (khaffeyeh); a flapping Israeli flag with a stylization of this scarf instead of the Star of David…
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Jeremy P. Kalgreen is a young photographer currently studying at Ohio State University’s Art Department in Columbus, Ohio. His work is made notable by his effort to include in his photographs a deeper philosophical subtext…
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Only a few Czech photographers of the younger generation have devoted themselves to something so financially unrewarding as documentary photography with such stubborn persistence and singleminded interest, for such a long period of time, and with such excellent results as the thirty year-old Vít Šimánek…
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Press photographers working for daily newspapers seldom find time
enough for their own creative work. Thus, Jiří Křenek (born 1974) who
has been photographing Formula-One races for years, as well as
reporting on a number of other motor events for Svût motorÛ and other
magazines, spends most of his time traveling…
The privilege granted by a safe part of the world is the possibility to observe the artificial, the possibility of freely choosing among its images. This colorful picture of a journey or a trip in pursuit of an artifact – as a sort of prop of leisure time – is presented to us in the photographs of Rocky McCorckle in his series Permanent Vacation…
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Dušan Skala, a graduate of Bachelor’s Studies in photography at the Faculty of
Applied Arts and Design at the J. E. Purkynû University in Ústí nad Labem,
creates a complex, multi-layered work, with a dash of unostentatious mystification, on the border between photography and video art: he works with the magic of images torn out of their context, the unspecified referentiality of pregnant moments and the possibility to transpose such recorded images into new contexts…
The works of Věra Stuchelová thematise above all memories or acts of conciliation that link the photographs with the vanished image of both near and
more distant past. In her series Private Space, a diploma work created in the studio of Veronika Bromová at the Prague Academy of Visual Arts, Stuchelová
presents experience as a gradual gathering of splinters of everyday sights into the cosy frames of black and white photography…
The threshold data of the market rules the world. The media hypnosis calms the masses. The individual subject yields to their function. Each theory fails when confronted by five countertheories. Every proposition shipwrecks on a thousand alternatives…
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Whereas in the United States, Great Britain, France, and other countries with a high percentage of immigrants, the problem of immigration has long been the center of attention of politicians, sociologists, and psychologists as well as artists, in the Czech Republic this issue went neglected until recently…
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Sylva Francová graduated this year from the Academy of Visual Arts in Prague, with a diploma work completed in the Studio of New Media under the supervision of Veronika Bromová. For her final project at the Academy, she created a cycle of digital photographs entitled “Portraits of Women”…
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The work of Tereza Kabůrková (1980) is an oscillation between photography and painting, and is manifested in both media. A free and original understanding of drawing penetrates her photographs, pervading them and being transformed by them in turn, in a (futile?) search for an ideal language…
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The first joint exhibition “1+1” of Jiří Thýn (1977), a student of photography at the Academy of Applied Arts in the studio of the recently deceased Pavel Štecha, and Adéla Svobodová (1978), a student in the studio of Prof…
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In her last collection of ten color photographs entitled Memory, Silvie Milková (b. 1976) searches for the relationship between emotion and memory, between the present and the past. The artist removes herself from the more strongly emotionally charged memories, and as a starting point for coming to terms with the past she takes personal snapshots from the last few years, which capture friends, places, things…
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In 2004, the Velryba Gallery in Prague hosted an exhibition of two young artists, Filip Láb (b. 1976) and Bára Mrázková (b. 1978), entitled Americká noc (Day for Night). The artists jointly presented a series of eight large- format photographs (180 x 137cm and 115 x 89cm), accompanied by a relatively short, but quite witty and incisive video loop…
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In this suite of photographs, Alastair Levy adopts what may be termed the conventions of conceptual and performance art exemplified by such artists as Hamish Fulton and Richard Long. The photograph in effect becomes a document of an event or a performance and it is this performance that is the artwork In the case of Long however, the performance (ie…
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In the Nineties, it seemed that we heard nothing about Slovak impromptu and documentary photography for a long time (outside the master of Slovak documentary Karol Kallay, only the work of Andrej Bán seemed to have distinct features) but the beginning of a new century, surprisingly, brought several striking personalities of the young generation to public notice…
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The main feature of the works of Tomáš Ludvík (b. 1980) is his preference for a conceptual approach, and a resignation to an aesthetic stylization and manipulation in photography. In a more narrow sense, Ludvík’s graduation project (accompanied by a critical essay published in the present issue of Fotograf, on page 108) People of an Environment (Lidé z prostředí 2002-2004), takes a critical stand towards one of the main tendencies of Czech documentary photography, which – with the proliferation of visual gesture – has lost a certain authenticity and trust…
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Ondřej Přibyl (born 1978, and since 1999 a student at the photography studio at the School of Architecture and Applied Arts in Prague) prefers to choose those themes that portray the problems of our civilization in a broader social context…
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… explains Tomáš Souček (b. 1975) and in this remark he offers a clue to the understanding of a creative approach employed not only in the collection of color photo prints Provizorní působiště (Provisional Place of Work, 2002) but also in his other works…
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Markéta Kinterová’s darkside consists of photographs the artist found either on internet and in newspapers or that she borrowed from television and explores the various masks of evil. She takes Thomas Ruff’s concept of appropriating images from newspapers and other media by removing them from their original context a step further by assembling her selection according to a theme…
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The photographs of Hannah Guy, a 27 year old student at the University of Arts in London, are created according to a user-friendly and uncomplicated matrix. Their message began to come together in many ”ordinary“ variations long before she herself took up the camera…
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All happy families resemble one another; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
/Tolstoy, Anna Karenina/
Working with found photographs Katherine Thurlow graduated with her work The Uncollected from the BA Photography course at The Surrey Institute of Art & Design in 2004…
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The video work of Ondřej Brody, produced at times in collaboration with Marek That has managed in the long term to keep its unmistakeable trademark poetics, characteristic for its unusual degree of absurdity and obscurity, sometimes bordering on the unbearable…
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We are going to look at a series of short films by Xavier Gautier, a young contemporary artist (born 1974) who recycles existing ”images“ such as photographs, film sequences and other types of analogue images that in English discourse are referred to by the term ”picture“…
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How strangely understandable is the nature of things that we no longer use for their original purpose. Found or collected objects, for instance – which within them combine the surviving finished state of things and our ever-evolving relation to them – sometimes shift past events back towards their time of occurrence…
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Karin Müller comes from Lucerne in Switzerland, where she studied graphic design. From 1996–1999, she lived in Prague and studied photography at FAMU (Film Academy of Performing Arts). At present, she lives and works in Berlin…
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As part of the project Confrontation, which took place at the Prague House of Photography, we had the opportunity to see the work of the Photography Studio FUUD of the University of J. E. Purkyně. Ten students presented their work on the theme ‘Subject – Object’…
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In the field of contemporary art photography, Boris Missirkov and Georgi Bogdanov’s large-format photo series ID 2000 is a central work. It depicts the generation of Bulgarians who, following the collapse of Communism, have spent the crucial years of their youth trying to imitate Western rituals and the mediagenerated surfaces…
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Jesper Alvaer, a Norwegian studying under the graphic artist Vladimír Kokolie at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, is known to the Czech artistic public mainly on account of his work in video over the last few years…
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Matthew Monteith first came to the Czech Republic in 1991, like thousands of other American tourists who discovered the magic of Eastern Europe, still saturated with the spirit of totalitarianism at the beginning of the 1990s…
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Tomaž Gregorić graduated from the Studio of Graphic Design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana. In 1994 he left for a yearlong study residence in London and decided to devote himself exclusively to photography…
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Tereza Severová is currently studying multimedia and conceptual art at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design, Prague.
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To write about photography and Jan Šalda in one article is tricky. He photographs with simplicity, bet he interprets his works much in the manner of the Romantic poet Karel Jaromír Erben. Uprooted stumps of wood are to him those under the influence of a magie spell, the tops of interlocked willow trees people connected to one another, poster-pillars are old men or wise counselors…
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In her photographic cycles and videos Linda Urbánková (b. 1978), a graduate of the Academy of Art, Architecture and Design, focuses almost exclusively on personal themes. In her older work (Pořád ještě z tebe šílíme / We Are Still Crazy About You, 2001, Dorty pro mne / Cakes For Me, 2003), in which she often staged herself in various situations, she rendered what she was experiencing at the time…
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In the photographs Petra Pětiletá staged together with Jana Doubková, one or the other are found standing next to a table at a reception. They are alone in halls devoid of people. In one picture, the waiters are unpacking drinking glasses…
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It is hard to describe those contradictory sensations of the spectral and seemingly uncanny that I experienced in my childhood, when in the vicinity of Praděd, in secluded thickets in the midst of pastures I found the remains of buildings; we used to visit clearings in the woods to pick cherries in an old orchard, and at an angle through the forest there ran a strip with no trees – and instead there was an boundary stone, and under the needles one might find cobblestones…
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Peter Homola (born 1977, graduate of the studio of Professor Milota Havránková at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, Bratislava) in his cycle of color photographs Building Walker (2006) persuades one that the possibilities of the photography of architecture, both in terms of form and content, are truly inexhaustible…
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In 1969 Jan Dibbets dug a hole in the shape of an irregular trapezoid into a lawn. He then took a photograph of it from a particular angle, so that in the final picture it appeared as a square (Perspective Correction: Square in Grass, Vancouver 1969)…
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The photographs of Petr Willert (born 1981), although created only in the last few years, already represent a peculiar phenomenon. If on the small area of the Bruntál region, Jindřich Štreit to some degree lives up to his statement, that the “village is the world”, and similarly, Viktor Kolář has already for five decades provided testimony of human existence in the Ostrava area, to the generation-younger Petr Willert, who lives nearby, such a multilayered microcosm is found in his grandmother’s two-room apartment in a tower block of flats…
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sex: male
age:27
occupation: student at AAAD
city: Prague
Contemporary life in large cities.
Much of the art that has emerged lately, in today’s society, is to a very significant degree influenced by technology and its accelerating evolution…
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“Visual affairs” is how Jan Lesák (born 1984), a student at the Photography Studio of the Faculty of Art and Design (Jan Evangelista Purkyně University in Ústí nad Labem) summarizes his works…
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Viktor Szemzö (born 1983) lives in Bratislava, although not in a housing project but in the old town. Bratislava’s most notorious as well as largest housing estate, built in place of gardens and peripheral rural houses, and moreover in the Danube flood plain – that is to say, in an area interwoven with numerous waterways – held such a powerful fascination for Szemzö that he photographed it several times…
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Reminiscent of Edward Muybridge’s scientific photographs of men, women and animals in motion, Lisa Byrne’s Simultaneous Perspectives has an initial experimental feel to it. The photographs of staggered figures trace the image of the body through time…
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Dreams in which you are walking around naked in public are very common.
They point out our insecurity and vulnerability. But if the naked person feels good in the dream, the dream indicates a desire for the erotic or represents an appreciation of your abilities…
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Ryan Pfluger (*1984) is a young American photographer and a recent graduate of the School of Visual Arts in New York. In both his artistic work as well as his commissioned magazine work, he focuses almost exclusively on portrait photography…
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Eroticism and sex make a rewarding subject for anyone who can manage not only to enjoy his physical arousal, but who at the same time can enthusiastically create an artistic record inspired by his sense of enchantment with the world of physical pleasure…
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In the late 1970s, Jean Baudrillard included several interesting passages on obscenity in his book Seduction: “Traditional obscenity still contains an element of transgression, provocation, or perversion…
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Radeq Brousil (b. 1980), studies and scholarships: Brussels, Montreal, Prague. In systematically building his own myth, he has based it on deliberate subversion. A sense of visual fragmentariness is to him an authentic expression of the contemporary experience, and probably also of the contemporary understanding of the world…
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Barbora Tichá is quiet (play on words here: Tichá in Czech means quiet)…just like she herself says in the animation…through the mouth of her friend who despises her precisely for this characteristic…
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After completing digital media studies at J.E. Purkyně University’s Faculty of Art and Design in Ústí nad Labem, George Hladík (1982) switched to Veronika Bromová’s New Media School at Prague’s Academy of Fine Arts…
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The Things Made by People (2003,1472 photographies 9×13 cm) it is a art work I made for my first solo exhibition taking place in the space of Jeleni Gallery in October, 2003. It consisted in a total documentation of all my belongings…
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Alex Plucer-Sarno is an action artist, art critic and one of the most important Russian experts in modern art. His blog (http://plucer.livejournal.com) is the most read art review in the Russian section LiveJournal, and in all the Internet periodicals and print magazines dealing with art in Eastern Europe (only in March 2008, there was a million visitors and five thousand commentaries on his blog)…
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This piece is personal because I myself took part in the production of Matěj Smetana’s video. He started by writing and calling his friends with request to bring anything to his party, which they would like to have animated in his new video…
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The globally understood and oft-used term “Helsinki School“ is not able to uncover the subtle nuances of the creative work of Finnish photographers. Certainly one can find a number of common features and approaches in their work…
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The work of Petra Steinerová, a graduate of Prague’s FAMU, can be typified for, among other reasons, its classic photographic quality. Ms. Steinerová creates larger film material, which in resulting products is left as copies of contact sheets, or on the contrary used as quality, large-format photo blowups…
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Artist, student of photography at FAMU, Klára Žitňanská, decided to
de-personify the family in her photo series, Rodina (Family). She does this
on two levels: both linguistically and visually…
Silvie Kolevová (*1979) is a noted personality among the younger generation of Czech photographers, for whom moments of global reach and multiculturalism are typical as are a parallel search for local identity and relations to one‘s own roots…
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A cool morning breeze flowed from the window across the room. The blankets flapped and it occurred to me that she looked like a cat as she took her time stretching.
But then she turned to face me and her cheeks shone as she blushed…
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Tereza Janečková’s exhibit project (she’s a student in her first year of doctoral studies at the Prague School of Design (AVU)) and of audiovisual culture theoretician, Pavlína Míčová, was first shown in 2005 as a series of life-size photographs…
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[…] these are lived lives closely connected with lives recounted and both are dependent on one another. Paradoxically one can say that the stories, which speak about life, intervene in lived lives – in order to recount them – even before those lives have been lived…
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IInspired by author J G Ballard’s literary visions of modernist architectural design and his prophetic views on the technological demise of the urban environment; Future Ruins presents the viewer with a photographic critique of the urban planning legacy of the 1970’s and Ballard’s novels of the same period…
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„Exploration through montage enables one to consider reality to be ‘modification’.“[ref]In: Didi-Huberman, G.: Pred časom (Dejiny umenia a anachronizmus obrazov). Kalligram, Bratislava 2006, p…
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Not only do mountains meet mountains and people meet people, but people meet mountains and mountains meet people. They also pass each other, provided they do not make mutual advances. When performances began in the 1970s, performers were influenced by a phenomenological relationship to the world…
Read moreIn September of this year Milan Fano Blatný (born in Brno in 1972) presented 19 pictures from his Photo Mandalas series in the prestigious Philadelphia Museum of Art. From a technical and aesthetic point of view this involved original blow-ups of photos on a silver emulsion, drawing from the photographer’s long-term interest in Eastern philosophy…
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The question how to interpret works of art is one of the most important in contemporary art theory, in aesthetics, and in a whole range of other scientific (and quasi-scientific) fields. Does the viewer have the right to think what “he/she wants” about the work, or should they attempt to reconstruct the artist’s thoughts? For each trend or theorist there is an opinion…
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There is a clear, mutual relationship in a number of independent works by Tereza Severová, a group that we could call on this occasion – for the sake of simplicity – by one of their names, Filling…
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The relationship between image and sound, between the seen and the heard was in the course of Western history mainly homological: the sound that was heard had its source that was seen, referred to it and was anchored in it…
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Jan Malý (1983) works with black-and-white and colour photography, computer graphics, he creates spatial objects (dioramas, plastics, etc.) combining his own and found photos, found objects and materials, often these are small promo materials, toys, etc…
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He’s a local patriot, who in order to create the majority of his exhibit collections needs only his grandmother’s two-room flat and its immediate surroundings. During the entire period of his studies at the Commercial Photography Studio of the Multi-media Communications Faculty at Tomáš Baťa University in Zlín he completed one piece of homework after the other via the close monitoring of this modest biotope or habitat…
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Most of Kamila Musilová’s photographic collections are characterised by a common approach to the body as an object: one that has been stripped of life and its own identity and has been transformed into a mere product…
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Between the years of 2000 to 2003 you studied photography and printing at the University of the Arts London; what where your main interests and goals at that time?
At that time I was collaborating with several very talented fashion graduates from Central St…
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We generally automatically expect fashion photography to go hand in hand with business. We expect then that this should be the case for the small Czech market, where after years of a non-market environment and scarcity, fashion photography is still looking to find itself…
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This text’s author has known the photographic artist too long and too well to see in the collection, SOFT, a reflection of his hobbies, his private and professional life and – after all – a view of the communications he has had for years with his artist-friends…
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The portrayal of a dead spot in life, a sort of inter-space that is almost indefinable, is a large challenge, even for an experienced artist. Juliana Křížová and Jakub Vlček, students of the Commercial Art Atelier of the Faculty of Art and Design at J…
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Finding a symbol/character, aspect, that is meant to give testimony to a certain cultural milieu – whether a local or a temporal definition – is tied to the act of balancing between an objective and a subjective opinion…
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… well sometimes it was used as an aid for drawing, but also it was used to copy some things and gradually it sped up at a terrible pace. Yes, and of course there was experimenting and when it looked interesting, someone at once declared it art…
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‘‘Perhaps my dreams are like me living various sections from my life over and over again. Maybe each time entering various time zones, which congeal with parallel segments – thinking of these segments as part sections from two mirrors facing one another, they go on for infinity…
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I contemplate the landscape that I see in pictures and I ask myself why Tereza Havlínková photographed them. What led her to choose this motif? What was the basis for this selection? In her landscape photographs the motif of the portrayed is not of primary importance…
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Found photographs coming from the hands of anonymous persons, moment photos showing lives of people we no longer know hide in them both a challenge and at the same time evoke marked unease as to how to handle them…
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As is well known, for art historians the period from the 1970s and 1980’s is one that is very difficult to research. Often it completely lacks any sort of printed documents on the realisation of an exhibition…
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