Tereza Sochorová work moves across many media from drawing to a video, installation or animation. Yet in the last few years a clear-cut line begins to stand out, exploring the artist’s relationship to various literary models, her own experiments with words or texts and the visual expression thereof. Her series Čtenářka (She Who Reads, 2006), Spisovatelka (Authoress, 2008), Vypravěčka (Narratress, 2009), Osvětlovačka (Illuminaress, 2010) a Posluchačka (Listeneress, 2012) processes these elements on a personal, partially autobiographical, and above all lyrical level. At the Kostka Gallery, Tereza Sochorová exhibits just the first and the last of the works mentioned, i.e. She Who Reads and the Listeneress. The basis for the She Who Reads work is the photo of the artist’s mother when pregnant, complemented by a fine animation and soundtrack suggesting what the woman sitting in a garden with a book on her lap might be reading. Rather paradoxically in relation to her mother in the family way, the literary model Tereza Sochorová is “silent reading”, is a passage from one of the last texts by Marguerite Duras Ecrire, where the author explores her relationship to loneliness, death, and memories. Sochorová makes a fine shift of this motif into the present with her second video, when she offers a reconstruction of an almost identical situation from the time of her own pregnancy. The sound recording for this work combines the texts of a short story Little Boy and the Distance by Daisy Mrázková and extracts from a live recording of author’s mother entry in a radio oracle where she heard that she was going to have a grandson and learned more about his destiny. The artist leads the viewer from the present moment to thinking about the future, the expectations and worries it brings, as well as contemplating one’s own past. Unlike the reconstructions of the early performances of the 1970s or 1980s, which is quite a popular procedure in the contemporary art, this process is genuinely personal, yet universal, posing the question of heredity pertaining not just to the body shape or personality traits, but also to the frame of mind, melancholy as well as situations one finds himself in.
Tereza Sochorová invited Filip Cenek to take part in her project, an artist with whom she collaborated many times in the past. His older piece Untitled (1996) provides a sort of counter-balance to Tereza Sochorová narratives. Here Cenek presents two almost identical shades of blue, one achieved by projecting a blue slide on a white surface, and the other, on the contrary, by a white projection on a blue background. Despite that both these works (similar to Sochorová) have the opposite, in this case abstracted, starting point, they finally meet in a united midpoint, a pair of blue surfaces, which, rather than a formal play with light, evoke certain mood, cleanness of blue waters, a clear blue sky, calming down, clearing up.
Thus, a fine mathematics is taking place on the object in the middle of the exhibition, where four projections unite into a single set consisting of two subsets. A repeated human situation that however is never identical, in contrast with an optical play where the same effect has been achieved by quite different means. One of the subsets working with words, the other with silence. As a whole, the Set is a striking phenomenon, uniting similar approaches to different contents into a single, coherent poetic statement.