ARTIST:

Tereza Zelenkova

Crocodiles
Tereza Zelenkova
Cometes
Tereza Zelenkova
Cometes
Tereza Zelenkova

To make photography startling in a culture saturated with the photographic image is Tereza Zelenkova’s - as every photographer’s - particular challenge. Her approach is to draw from the estrangement of image and subject familiar from Surrealist photography: to dismantle the photograph’s claims to truth, to complicate the act of looking. Take her photograph Cometes (its title referring to the Greek term meaning both ‘comet’ and ‘long-haired’): the stark flash associated with paparazzi photography, its hard light a way to render every blemish visible in the gloom of night, has been applied to an image of concealment, of invisibility.

Crocodiles
Tereza Zelenkova

Standing at the corner of a church in Prague, a girl runs her fingers through her very long hair, which nearly sweeps the ground. The hair takes on its own spectral life (the church architecture and implied graveyard adding supernatural resonances to the image); it might be an embrace between a human and a ghost. Zelenkova’s work Crocodiles turns the photograph against itself in a similar way. Taken on a huge chicken farm in the Czech Republic (the artist’s homeland), the image depicts crocodiles used as a cheap way of disposing of unsellable chickens. The image elides its context, though, filling the frame with the piled-up bodies of the animals, whose complex scaling creates a kind of swirling abstraction. The black and white film transforms the crusty skins of the creatures into dusty stone. The act of photography is, here, a kind of Medusa’s gaze: the world seems ancient, mythic, and troubling.

Text by Ben Street

Save Your Cart
Share Your Cart
0
    0
    Your Cart
    Your cart is emptyReturn to Shop

    Search the Saatchi Gallery website

    Thank you for your enquiry!

    Your message was sent and one of our Admin team will respond as soon as possible.

    If you have an urgent question, please call our front desk on 020 7811 3070.

    For more information on how we store and use your data please view our privacy policy here. You can unsubscribe from our newsletters at any time by clicking on the links below the emails we send you.

    Essential Information Before Your Visit:
    Click Plan Your Visit for full information on upcoming closures.

    Register for email updates
    Be the first to hear about the latest Saatchi Gallery exhibitions, events, offers and news