Latent Revolutions

Photography as a performance consisting of past actions
The exhibition has been mounted as a pilot project of a newly established Milota Havránková Foundation, in cooperation with the Central European House of Photography, Bratislava City Gallery, and the Department of Photography and New Media, Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava. The Foundation aims to initiate and support the annual exhibition of two well-established photographers from Slovakia and abroad, supplemented with works by an emerging young artist.
The exhibition of three female photographers from former Czechoslovakia combines three specific approaches trying to find the inner freedom in the world that, for quite objective reasons, seems to be unbalanced, imperfect, or even limiting. The works of each artist focus on a different period, from hectic sixties and seventieth (Milota Havránková), through the post-normalisation calm of the eighties (Libuše Jarcovjáková), to post-revolution presence (Zuzana Pustaiová). Each photographer has developed an authentic and distinctive photographic language through which she finds inner freedom, balance or the essentials that might be invisible at first sight. In a sense, this process can be perceived as intimate, latent revolution from “below”, primarily reflecting the subjective experience and uncovering even deeply-rooted architecture of social, political, cultural and gender setup of the system in which they got stuck.
It is the performative effort to re-run and capture in front of the lens various forms of one´s own past actions to finally create a new functioning unit characterised by inner harmony and self-transcending content that connects the works of all three artists. Milota Havránková and Libuše Jarcovjáková stood outside the main art trends. As their works were peculiar and hard to classify, they were perceived with circumspection even long after the Velvet revolution. Zuzana Pustaiová follows in many ways, however, she reflects the experience from a different period and perspective. Yet, she feels many residues and aftertastes of social stereotypes in everyday social routines. And she comes to terms with them with a similar performative preoccupation, grace and smile.
The exhibition offers a multidimensional photographic picture of our recent history and presence. This picture has been marked by a strong will of the artists to preserve their creative freedom, which would allow them to latently and consistently resist and reach personal and (perhaps also) social catharsis.
Anna Vartecká