Tereza Zelenkova

Tereza Zelenkova’s analogue black-and-white photographs explore the threshold between reality and myth. Her practice often draws on literature, philosophy, and history, examining how images can both record and reimagine the past.

The photographs came from various series; each focuses on a different subject, and together they reflect her ongoing interest in photography’s ability to reveal the mythical within the everyday. Most of the works—Dead Tongue (2020), Moth II (2020), The Secret Language of Images (2020), Bones (2020), and The Skull of Descartes (2020)—belong to Dead Language. In this body of work, Zelenkova examined the relationship between verbal language and images through phenomena such as animal mimicry, the human capacity to articulate thought, and the inherent ambiguity of both photographs and written language.

Simultaneously, the photographs are composed in the tradition of still lifes (vanitas), reflecting on mortality and the gradual obsolescence of black-and-white analogue photography as a fading form of visual language.