Tereza Zelenková

Tereza Zelenková’s work hovers on the border of documentary and conceptual photography. Although in her monochrome analogue photographs she uses the medium for its natural ability to capture reality, often documenting specific historical locations, she then combines these images with staged photos. These help her to bend, distort or abandon these (historical) facts in favour of the resulting series, whose joint outcome, regardless of the theme chosen, is a surreal, ambivalent world on the boundary of reality and fiction.

She set forth the key themes of her work in the project Absence of Myth from 2013. We see Freud’s study (Sigmund Freud’s Study, 2013), a portrait of Arthur Rimbaud, the Welsh coast, the grave of Georges Bataille (Charles Bataille’s Grave, 2011), conserved period interiors (Confessional, Paris, 2013), and old museum exhibits (Statue, V&A, 2013). Zelenková searches out places with a symbolic or mythical potential (or with a literary significance) and subjects them to empirical and ideological research. However, rather than archiving individual facts or legends, she is interested in exploring a general poetics (of landscape and stories) and creating subjective mythologies. This is achieved through a completely contrasting, “cataloguing” approach to poetics, in which photographs are presented in thematically organised panels with headings, as though they were entries from an encyclopaedia. The resulting ensemble thus resembles the catalogue of an institutional collection, which is at the same time a lyrical photo album. Zelenková transforms the literal into the symbolic: all beauty has an undertone of something mysterious, melancholic, and close to death.

The title of this piece is also a reference to the book of the same name by Georges Bataille (The Absence of Myth: Writings On Surrealism), to whose works Zelenková periodically returns for inspiration (Night Is Also a Sun, 2011; Georges Bataille’s Grave, 2013; The Essential Solitude, 2017). Zelenková is, like Bataille, interested in mysticism, surrealism and intense, often extreme, experience, in which eroticism and violence are in a relationship to spirituality. It is for this reason that she selects historical locations with a strong magical charge, conceiving them as portals of the transcendental, imaginary portals to the spiritual realm, which does not necessarily have to hold out the promise of immortality but is in fact the very opposite. An example of this would be the pictures in the unfinished collection A Snake That Disappeared Through a Hole in the Wall (from 2015), which focuses on the mythology of the Czechoslovak countryside and contains within itself an indexical image of death. Houska Castle was supposedly built to close the gate to hell, while Čachtice Castle (Elizabeth Bathory’s Bedroom, Čachtice, 2015) was inhabited by the infamous mass murderer yearning for eternal beauty. Photographs of places associated with legends (e.g. Devil’s Table, Beskydy, 2015) are combined with geographical curiosities (Dog Cemetery, 2015), the death mask of Gustav Meyrink (Gustav Meyrink’s Death Mask, 2016), and a staged spiritualist séance (The Unseen, 2015). The entire series has strong literary overtones influenced by classical stories from the Czech countryside by Karel Jaromír Erben and Karel Hynek Mácha. In 2015 Zelenková won the prestigious Jerwood Photoworks Award for the cycle and was amongst the finalists in the ING Unseen Talent Award.

The romantic way in which Zelenková approaches the landscape inevitably led her to literature as one of her main sources of inspiration. In her early collection The Other Night (2012) she cites the philosophical novel Thomas the Obscure (1941) by Maurice Blanchot, while in Some Kind of Night Into Your Darkness (2016), which references the song Fade Into You by Mazzy Star and was commissioned for the Unseen Festival in Amsterdam, she draws freely on a dark romantic story from Babička / The Grandma by Božena Němcová about crazy Viktorka, who falls madly in love with a soldier and loses her mind. The Essential Solitude (2017) is a tribute to decadent literature and contains references to Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Lautréamont, Georges Bataille and Joris-Karl Huysmans, whose character Jean des Esseintes from the novel À Rebours – like the main protagonist of the photographic series – is isolated at home and adapts his surroundings so as to reflect his favourite works of art.

A common denominator of all of Zelenková’s cycles is a separation from the classical (linear, historical) flow of time. In her photographs time is frozen or suspended, as are their actors. The long-haired woman in The Essential Solitude (2017), who appears in earlier series (The Other Night, 2012), is a passive entity watching the decay of her own abode. Although she is a living human being, she is closer to death. A similar timelessness is represented by the location of a 17th-century building situated on the outskirts of London’s financial district. In the 1960s this was rebuilt by its new owner, Dennis Severs, into a time capsule representing different historical periods from the 17th to the 19th century. Time flows cyclically, creating a network of relationships between stories, legends, facts and fiction, in which the past repeatedly merges into the presence. Although Zelenková maps local mythologies, the result is never an exact scientific study but is more fluid, liquescent, a never-completed record in time. Like the medium of photography itself, these works hold out the promise of immortality while at the same time serving as a reminder of the inevitability of death.

For Zelenková photography is an almost alchemical process, a hybrid discipline incorporating science, art and philosophy.[1] Her approach links her to the pragmatic romanticism represented by meta-modernism: she returns to the art of romantic sensitivity, yet without ideological anchorage oscillates between irony and honesty, naivety and knowingness, relativism and truth, optimism and doubt.[2]

[1] Zelenková, Tereza: Exhibition catalogue for A Snake That Disappeared Through a Hole in the Wall, Foam Amsterdam 2016, p. 6.

[2] Turner, Luke: Metamodernist Manifesto, available at www.metamodernism.org

Autorské knihy

2018

The Essential Solitude, autorská kniha ke stejnojmenné výstavě v Ravestijn Gallery, Amsterdam, vydáno vlastním nákladem

2013

The Absence of Myth, autorská kniha ke stejnojmenné výstavě v Legion TV, Londýn, vydáno vlastním nákladem; předmluva Daniel C. Blight, báseň Ed Anon

2012

Index of Time, společně s Peterem Watkinsem; autorská kniha se třemi povídkami od Olivera Shamlou, vydáno vlastním nákladem

2011

Supreme Vice, Morel Books, Londýn, Velká Británie

Skupinové publikace

2015

A Handful of Dust, David Campany, MACK Books, Londýn, Velká Británie

2012

Seeing for Others, Black Dog Publishing, Londýn, Velká Británie

Hijacked, Big City Press, Perth, Austrálie

2011

The Collector’s Guide to Emerging Art Photography, Humble Arts Foundation

EN

2018

https://www.bjp-online.com/2018/04/tereza-zelenkova-explores-legend-myth-and-solitude-in-two-upcoming-solo-shows/

https://www.foam.org/about/press-office/foam-3h-tereza-zelenkova

theheavycollective.com/2018/05/01/qa-tereza-zelenkova-the-essential-solitude/

https://phroommagazine.com/tereza-zelenkova/

https://metalmagazine.eu/en/post/interview/tereza-zelenkova-digging-into-whats-hidden

http://www.1000wordsmag.com/tereza-zelenkova/

2016

vimeo.com/181051965

https://dergreif-online.de/artist-feature/tereza-zelenkova/

https://fotoroom.co/untitled-tereza-zelenkova/

https://openeye.org.uk/blog/artist-interview-tereza-zelenkova/

2013

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/oct/31/tereza-zelenkova-photography-exhibition-london-freud

http://www.dazeddigital.com/photography/article/16884/1/tereza-zelenkova-dark-reality

https://paper-journal.com/tereza-zelenkova/

https://www.calvertjournal.com/features/show/5119/tereza-zelenkova-joanna-piotrowska-photography-jerwood-photoworks-awards

http://www.metamodernism.com/2013/11/12/quiet-moves/

CZ

https://wave.rozhlas.cz/syndromem-golden-age-netrpim-ziju-rada-v-tehle-dobe-rika-fotografka-bezcasi-7774560

https://fotografmagazine.cz/magazine/o-fotografii/objevy/tereza-zelenkova/

https://www.galeriejeleni.cz/2014/tereza-zelenkova-dva-a-dva-je-pet/