“For a long time my grandmas have been just a hazy memory from my childhood. I used to know them only as some sort of a story that is usually said to pass on in families about people who deceased. For me, it is a deep- rooted pattern, literally a framework, a crate or a stage. Libuse passed away when I was only one year old, Jirina in my age of eight, but then she had been for a long time so mentally ill, she never talked to me. Pieces of their lives shape the environment around me and my family. Through these things I began looking for my grandmas. For instance, why is there a inscription “Svatoborice” on a small copper heart? And where that peculiar hand-sewn doll came from? Why Jirina wrote a three page letter asking just for a jumper and stockings? So my thoughts went to Svatoborice near Kyjov, where Libuse was imprisoned in her age of 16 because of her father, a high officer of Czech military units in England. Or to the psychiatric hospital in Prague where Jirina was put from time to time. As I did not get a chance to be with my grandmas, at least I substitute it by an imaginary encounter with them in photography. I tried to empathize their individual and crucial life stages in the way I had read about them. They are not stylized self-portraits, nor the portraits of my grandmothers. They are impressions loosely filtered and interpreted by me. In the photographs I used their authentic belongings.”
Barbora Bálková (1978, AVU Prague, Veronika Bromova’s New Media) in the form of stylised self–portraits captures the authentic family stories reflecting symbolically broader historical events of the 20th century. Ten large format colour photographs and one very unexpected installation. www.barborabalkova.cz