Tereza Zelenková’s work often focuses on photographing landscape and places where reality overlaps with fictitious worlds. These places bear the concrete traces of history and at the same time allude to mythical narratives; similar to photography they oscillate between documentary form and a subjective interpretation of the world. Images imbued with a strong emotional mood are testimony of a very personal vision of a familiar landscape which keeps on incessantly changing before the very eyes of the observer. Although decadent motifs in the Gothic style are prevalent here, the dark atmosphere of the melancholy images is relieved now and again by a touch of irony. The artist’s quest for mysticism and the spiritual amidst the rationally structured reality may appear as a form of escapism. Yet at the same time Tereza Zelenková is concerned with authenticity in photography, avoiding artificial composition or visual formalism. She works with large-format black-and-white photography, manually printed in the darkroom using traditional techniques. An important part of the creative process is editing the photographs, looking for parallels, curious connections and poetic analogies between the separate images.

Barbora Bartůňková