artists

Alena Kotzmannová

Alena Kotzmannová, from the ArtList Database for Contemporary Art, courtesy the Center for Contemporary Arts, Prague
by Pavlina Morganová

Alena Kotzmannová came onto the Czech art scene in 1998, when she finished her studies at the Art-Industrial College (VSUP). Her thesis work was a photographic series called Temporary Person (1997-1998). In this work she drew inspiration from science fiction and in the details of our current world she sought out the reflection (afterglow) of the distant future. Already at that time she enriched her photography with various forms of adjustment, such as developing pictures in the classic manner on a screen or their packaging into plastic wrap. Her series of black-and-white photography followed Near Darkness (1999-2000) and Station to Station (2000-2001). In her installation Someone's Calling You (1998), Kotzmannová first connects large-format photography to video projection. It concerns a photo of two phone booths, whose abandonment is underscored by the video's sound. The soundtrack includes a recording of the footsteps of passers-by and rings, which no one answers. Similar types of installations, in which Kotzmannová brazenly combines video and large-format photography, are typical for several of her other works like Famke (1999) or Path to the Hook (2000). Among her other important series are Classic (2001-2004), which includes more than 60 black-and-white photos made by classic photographic technique on film in panorama shots, without digital manipulation. In the photos Kotzmannová tries to capture the reality of the present with a view, as if from another historical time.

Kotzmannová is a personality, who thanks to her openness to co-operation, has made her way across the entire art scene. She gladly takes part in a variety of projects. As part of her conceptual approach she plays with the rules and boundaries of photography. But she mainly reflects upon the content of this media itself. Through her installations she communicates an unusual view of the things and stories happening around us. She is able to expose the assumed, presaged and mysterious moments of their existence. She also accentuates the poetry and common beauty that accompany them.


The Snares of the Negative, an excerpt from the article, Fotograf 3/2004
by Pavel Vančát
>The photographs of Alena Kotzmannová are enigmatic, both at first glance and upon a deeper reading. Perhaps their most basic feature is their subtlety in examining the borders of reality, as well as their complex play with the limits and laws of photography. In the context of contemporary Czech art, Kotzmannová represents a surprisingly traditional approach to photography, even if she also transcends its horizons by far. She thus meditates about the medium as such, its various forms, vacant spaces and processes that bring unexpected and startling fusions and insights.
Kotzmannová's love for black and white photography is the symptom of an interest in a near-extinct media and its historical connotations. On the one hand, she often rigorously challenges the photographic genre by using various special techniques and adjustments (e.g. printing on canvas or prints wrapped in plastic sheets), yet on the other hand cannot part with photography. Although we can see in her photographs common traits with the "imaginative photography" that has a long tradition in the Czech lands, Kotzmannová's approach is really based on the poetics of contemporaneity, on a concept that understands formlessness and arbitrariness as a necessity, or as a structural element - she thinks as a builder, not as a registrar. There is more darkness than light, more mysteries than revelations.

Born 1974 in Prague. Lives and works in Prague.

Alena Kotzmannová studied at the Hollar School for Graphic Design and then at the Prague Academy of Applied Arts from 1992-98, in the Studio of Conceptual and Intermedia Art and the newly established Photography Studio. She has received several scholarships and stipends for creative work abroad, in England, Greece, Finland, New York City and Mexico. She currently also teaches at the Department for New Media at the University in Pilsen and this autumn has plans to go for an extended period of study to Portugal. Her work can currently be seen at the Prague Biennale (The Apartment series) and the Month of Photography in Krakow. hunt kastner willl be featuring her work at the Liste Art Fair in Basel in June, presenting work from the series Globes and Not Yet.