Markéta Othová’s artistic practice explores and transcends the boundaries of the photographic medium; she constantly questions its nature and the (un)stable character of the contemporary visual world. Typical of her work is a cyclical temporality, where the camera serves as a means of continuous displacement between place and time, for which Othová often uses methods based on editing and film language. These distinctive compositional strategies also emphasise formal simplicity and purity – the message of individual shots is fragmented in itself, and meaning is constructed only after viewing the larger whole.
The early cycles Paris–Texas (1998) and Excalibur (1999) were created in this spirit, along with Pardon? (2005), which Othová compiled from her extensive personal archive systematically built up during her travels outside the Czech Republic. The large-format black-and-white prints (with a strict format of 110 × 160 cm), whose titles often also refer to the very compositional method used, create a lyrical narrative of nomadism and fleeting moments in place and time. Othová shapes the cycles associatively: in Paris–Texas she places a pair of unobtrusive photographs of flowers (Untitled, 1995) and a group of children in the middle of a parking lot (Untitled, 1996) side by side. Factually speaking, the images are not linked, but by placing them side by side she creates a mental image of a drive-through, reinforced by a reference to Wenders’ film. The Excalibur series, which the artist presented at Carnegie International in Pittsburgh, works in a similar way: six photographs appear as fragmentary memories taken out of context. A pair of discarded shoes, a car with a broken window and the façade of a house peeking out of the gloom evoke a wasted night on the street, but the rest of the images make the viewer hesitate over the veracity of such a suggestion (just as they would hesitate over the veracity of the Arthurian legends). What remains is a feeling of intimacy induced by the concreteness of the images, which is in the end a highly ambivalent feeling.
While the series referred to above do not depict any external, temporally specified reality (but work with psychic time), the cycles created after the turn of the millennium abandon this structure in favour of linear narrative time. This turn already occurs in Othová’s earlier work Její život / Her Life (1998), when she first used the strategy of cinematographic sequential shooting. She subsequently exhibited in the hall of the Veletržní Palace of the National Gallery in Prague a six-times multiplied, identical photograph of a woman walking, which she took from the window of the building of this institution: the image seems to move, but its protagonist does not. The filmic logic is further pursued in the series Návrat / Return (2000), with which she also won the Jindřich Chalupecký Prize two years later. This work captures the completely routine activity of a woman walking a dog on a Prague street, but the artist lends meaning to the almost banal act by breaking it up into twelve separate, not necessarily consecutive, photographs: she keeps their genuine order to herself. The whole series thus evokes a film frozen in single shots, an impression that is reinforced by the large-format conception of the photographs. Něco, na co si nemůžu vzpomenout / Something I Can’t Remember (2000) captures the interior of the functionalist villa of the director Martin Fryč, which his widow has kept unchanged since his death in 1935. Thus, almost seventy years later, Othová photographs an entire time cycle that is simultaneously ending, taking place, and beginning.
With her later works, there is a gradual shift from visual poetry to a more constructive handling of the photographic medium. The artist seems to be observing time, which suddenly stopped with the transition to the photographic studio environment. This logically opens up a greater space for exploring other photographic practices and genres. The reductive tendencies of the avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s are evident in the collections Leçon de photographie (2007) and Untitled (2008), in which the artist still works with real images, and eventually culminate in the series of eleven purely abstract compositions of centrifugal movement Mayday (2004–2007). All of these are merely variations on a single image, but the use of different photographic formats creates an optical illusion of rapidly rearranging kaleidoscopic sequences. Meaning here is not constructed as movement (through the space of the installation, from one photograph to the next), but purely visually.
The temporal suspension also allows Othová to go back to the beginning of the time cycle, to her work with the archive, and to turn her attention back to herself. In Nikam nechoď / Don’t Go Anywhere (2015), she cites her early cycle Její život / Her Life (1998), and in 1933 (2015), she turns to her memories of a purely personal subject, her father’s glass work. Although she presents her photographs of vases, bowls and other small objects in the form of the characteristic black-and-white large-format photographs that she has abandoned in recent years, the conscious handling of the specific characteristics of photography remains a fundamental feature of the whole series. Although these are product images of applied art, the artist avoids technically precise processing, depicts glass objects as minimalist still lifes, and underlines the fact of her isolation from the tradition of classical photography by using billboard paper. Conventional photographic practices are further challenged in the exhibition 1990–2018 (Fait Gallery, 2018), where the apparent banality of the documented items from her personal archive (diaries, boxes of photographs, fabrics, printed materials) is further emphasised by the use of a non-photographic method, namely scanner recording, which is more typical of digital archiving. This brings Othová to the very boundary of the medium shared with graphic design, which she definitively crosses by exhibiting photographs of book covers to which she has contributed graphic designs (Svět knihy / Book World, 2019).
Othová systematically explores the possibilities of photographic narration. Whether her methods take the form of a diary record or are more experimental, all her photographs hint at the course of the action. However, while each narrative is based on a temporal sequence, the categories of time are disrupted. On occasion, time seems to continue its naturally linear course, while at other times it has stopped and seems to remain a memory that fears precision, a memory of something that was not[1] – and/or has passed. Markéta Othová’s photographs can be seen as images of transfer, paralleling our lives in an imaginary place in between, in the transition from the present to what is to come.[2]
[1] Gellner, František. Radosti života, Carpe Diem, Praha 2017, s. 23.
[2] Dainton, Barry. Self: A Philosophy in Transit, Penguin Books, London 2014, s. 142.
