Silvie Milková graduated from the studio of photography at the Faculty of Arts and Design at the University of Jan Evangelista Purkyně in Ústí nad Labem, where she has been working as a professional assistant since 2007. She works with photography, video art, performance, curatorship and interventions in public space. Her work is characteristic for being ambiguous. She uses models from reality, which she constructs into fictive worlds in her artistic testimony. Therefore,sShe balances on the edge of the realistic and the fictive. Her inspiration comes from citations of routine schemes of the human behaviour. The work of Silvie Milková respects traditional values of a clean photographic technique. However, she knows how to open up these values in her multimedia work with experimental additives. In her work, she uses fragments of stories that often refer to her own self and to her perception of the world. She emphasizes the fact that reality is not fully graspable by the media of photography and video. She is therefore interested in the form of a visual record – snapshots, fleeting performances, etc.
In 2003, she introduced her thesis project with 41 photographs entitled Alice in Wonderland. The photographs were full of playfulness and fantasy. She was inspired by the famous story of Lewis Carroll, which she transferred to image symbolism. In 2004, she produced the collection Memory. The artists worked with the media of photography as a memory track. Her collection of ten photographs examined the subjective memory in the context of the past and present. A part of it was the probing of emotional memory, which creates its own recollections and uniqueness of personal experiences. In 2008 she brought attention to herself with the project Umenimamrad.cz (Ilikeart.cz). The project took place within the scope of the program of Prague’s ARTWALL Gallery, and in cooperation with students from the Faculty of Art and Design at the University of Jan Evangelista Purkyně in Ústí nad Labem. Here she revealed her interest in making the wide public familiar with contemporary art. On the background of researching advertising strategies within the scope of promoting the work of the young generation of visual artists, she presented an exhibition of posters in a tram in Brno entitled ARTRAM and an exhibition of photographs in Prague’s shopping centre Palladium, which is daily filled with people – unlike the empty art galleries. In 2009, she continued in this spirit and she founded, together with Veronika Daňhelova, the group Duoperformance. Their basic statement was that they will work together and in the form of performances. During that year they both curated the exhibition Creating of Worlds in the Emil Filla Gallery in Ústí nad Labem and they founded the nonstop Gallery Vitrínka in the area of Severočeska Armaturka in the same town. At the exhibition Finally Together, which interconnected Czech independent galleries and took place in the Emil Filla Gallery, Silvie Milková presented herself on behalf of Gallery Vitrínka together with Veronika Daňhelova, Vojtěch Marek and Pavel Havrda. They put together the installation The Best Art. It opened up a number of questions about contemporary art. This piece of artwork was unique by being fragile, temporary and translucent.
In her video installation Passenger (11:29 min) from the year 2009, Milková indicated a story with the help of symbolism and strong emotions. The video was exhibited in the form of an object of a hanging plastic bag with a small screen. The video deals with contemporary art. What is true art? How should it be interpreted properly? She deals with same questions in her Duoperformance. Silvie Milková tries to find the essence of art as something unordinary. Her work is based on personal memories. It is also characteristic for a certain type of irony, emphasized either by imperfect form, or by the destruction of traditional values. Symbolism, personal mythology and an artist’s status in society are important to her.
