„The Place From Where You Think“

Aleksandra Vajd and Hynek Alt most often work as a duo and this includes running the Photography Atelier at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague. In his book published this year, The Art of Collaboration (Umění spolupráce), part of which is devoted to photography, Jan Zálššák presents them, along with LukṚ Jasanský and Martin Polák, as an important collaborating pair. In recent years they worked on a thorough, albeit not uninspired, analysis of photography as a medium; the medium of cameras, and other cameras entering the process of creating a work. They explored individual elements of this environment and tried to escape from original correlations. The photograph’s illusive nature provided them the basis for its underscoring and the exposure of apparition and deception – by relatively adventurous, still often mechanical, methods – as when they turned the gallery into a laboratory and made the photo equipment a means for transforming the weather, returning to the present a once ridiculed utopia of possibilities for controlling the natural climate by artificial means. They understand their exhibition as a parallel reality, where relationships between individual elements are newly-associated, rearranged and shifted. This “alchemic” work is reflected also in the new exhibition, the place from where you think, which from a realistic point of view builds on their stay in Mexico and also on the environment of Slovene caves. The abstracted fabric uses the indexical relationship between reality and its portrayal, which can, only when working together, expose what they show and thus maintain as many layers of meaning.