Tereza Darmovzalová↓

About the work

open plan

In her artistic practice, Tereza Darmovzalová has long focused on the conceptual research of social phenomena based on everyday reality. She employs the media of installation and video as tools for observing and uncovering her resources, which stem from the conditions of today’s world defined by neoliberal practices and the biopolitics of power. The leitmotif is the redefinition of these relations and the search for new perspectives. Darmovzalová programmatically works with appropric and subversive procedures both in a formal and an ideological sense. Her primary authorial method is the post-production treatment of image and sound archives. At her last exhibition In the Light of Controlled Events, held in the Etc. gallery in Prague, she presented a video installation, the main motif of which was the fictitious communication among greenhouse employees who are looking for a tool for social change in a long-term subversive tactics.

In her diploma thesis, Darmovzalová concludes her personal experience of a different work and life conditions that transformed the second half of her studies at the Academy. It captures the situation when she tries to build a new world on the foundations of the old one, while not resigning and denying her past, her desires and instincts, but trying to live with them, describe them and use them as a tool for her future actions. The given image is thus set in a personal frame. Darmovzalová defines it by her relation to the inheritance of her grandfather, who embodies the rise and fall of capitalist entrepreneurship in the Czech Republic in the 1990s, and by the history of three generations of women who are now trying to find out how to deal with his inheritance and their own future. Viewers find themselves in a remodeled office, which is a scene of past, present and future negotiations on the fates of women seeking a fundament of collective history and personal desires and ambitions.