This rising star's dark imagination is given free rein in a spooky new show, which features shots of a Michelangelo wrapped in cellophane and the great psychoanalyst's armchair
A statue by Michelangelo shrouded in cellophane, Sigmund Freud's leather armchair and the grave of the French philosopher George Bataille are among the arresting black-and-white images in The Absence of Myth, an intriguing exhibition by Tereza Zelenkova at Legion TV in east London.
The show is a small, one-room affair, but it is brimming with ideas and is further testimony to the richness of Zelenkova's dark imagination, which draws on the writings of Freud, Rimbaud and Bataille as much as any visual touchstones.
Born in the city of Ostrava in the Czech Republic, Zelenkova lives in London, having completed an MA in Photography at the Royal College of Art in 2012. I've been aware of her work since she was selected for the Fresh Faced & Wild Eyed exhibition, dedicated to the best graduate work, at the Photographers' Gallery in 2011. Back then, her series Supreme Vice addressed the revival of occult beliefs in the 19th century in a rather oblique way. It was published in a limited-edition book, now sadly out of print, by Morel. Though her work remains elusive – and richly allusive – her vision has deepened since then.
She is, she says, an intuitive photographer, who pursues her obsessions though her photography and, latterly, her writing. I was struck by the strange, melancholy beauty of the text that accompanies her images in The Absence of Myth. In her musings on Paris for instance, she seems to think out loud, but in a way that pulls you into her sombre landscapes and interiors, while also capturing the strange sense of dislocation foreign cities can induce in the solitary visitor.
"And so, sitting at Places des Vosges, surrounded by strangers," she writes, "once again I'm thinking about the past of the last few days, but also the past of centuries lived on the dusty streets of Paris. The strange silence of Monday afternoon and the lack of sleep brings a feeling of slightly altered consciousness. The only thing that binds me to reality is the place, the sound of fountains, and the endless circulation of water falling from dozens of small lion heads, only to be pumped back up in order to fall down again, and to repeat this over and over, like a cyclic poem, like history itself."
Bataille, you feel, would have approved. In the small book that accompanies the exhibition, these words appear in an extended meditation opposite an image of the mysterious Temple de la Sybille, which sits on a wooded promontory above a still lake in Parc des Butes Chaumont, Paris. Daydream and melancholia are constants in her work, as is the shadow of her literary influences. Her portrait of the young Rimbaud is a photograph of him extracted from a group portrait made in 1872 by the painter Henri Fantin-Latour.
It emphasises his ragamuffin beauty and looks, surreally, like a blurred photographic portrait. In her portrait of Freud's chair, which is really a portrait of Freud, she shows how it echoes the African sculptures he surrounded himself with. A rather grotesque object, it also resembles both the human and phallic form and, as Zelenkova notes, "haunts the study with Freud's eternal presence."
Zelenkova's photography draws on, and suggests, Freud's notion of the unconscious. But there is also something of the latter-day surrealist about her. For evidence, look no further than Cometes (2012) – the title translates from the Greek as both "comets"and "long-haired" – currently on show at the Saatchi Gallery as part of the New Order: British Art Today group show. Shot on the streets of Prague with an unforgiving flash, it nevertheless seems to belong to another time and place – as do many of her photographs. This is not to do with nostalgia or her use of black-and-white, but is rooted perhaps in a sense of personal and creative displacement: a dissatisfaction with the rush and clatter of contemporary culture.
What I most like about The Absence of Myth, though, is the silence of her images and the way that silence lets her ideas breathe. I hope she keeps writing, because the words work so well as an atmospheric accompaniment to the images, and adds to the sense of a singular vision at work. It is a strange and oblique one – and all the more hauntingly powerful for that.
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