MARIE TOMANOVA, one of the most exciting young artists from Czech Republic, is now based in New York. Her exhibition Live for the Weather during the European Month of Photography had to close earlier because of the pandemic. She took it with a smile and invited us for a discussion with the New York art historian and curator THOMAS BEACHDEL about Post-Soviet youth culture, identity politics, and why she never planned to become a photographer.

Béton Bleu: Marie, your current show “Live for the Weather” at the Czech Centre Berlin had to close earlier because of the second partial lockdown in Germany. You opened another show in New York City recently. How is the situation there? 

Marie Tomanova: The situation is really unclear. The numbers are going up very quickly but no one knows what that means or what steps will be taken. I feel like we will go into another lock-down. I hope that we will. That would be the safest thing for everyone.

BB: Your exhibition “Live for the Weather” is sort of a culmination of your past years as a photographer and curator. It takes its name from a work included in the 2017 exhibition “Baby I Like It Raw: Post-Eastern Bloc Photography & Video”. How dominant is the topic of Post-Soviet Youth in your work?

Marie: Displacement and its effects on identity are definitely a big part of my work. Thomas and I were approached in 2017 by the Czech Center New York to do an exhibition that focuses on the young generation that grew up after the fall of the Iron Curtain. We worked together with so many talented photographers and filmmakers from all over the former Eastern Bloc and Soviet Union, such as Slava Mogutin, Masha Demianova, Sasha Kurmaz, Gorsad, Daniel King, Martynka Wawrzyniak and George Nebieridze, to name a few. It was fascinating to see how these young people see their environment.

BB: Your curatorial text is quite critical. You write: “The West has grown fat, fat, fat and gluttonous. Post-WWII, it has devoured everything and spun a global web of consumer desire, shaping identity through materialism and media.”

Thomas: The images have a special energy. Kids who grew up in Russia, Poland, or the Czech Republic soon after the Iron Curtain fell now define their identity against a consumer history, a consumer history they never had, but now do... Each presentation invited a different perspective on life influenced by totalitarian rule, or its absence.

BB: The exhibition also plays with the cliché of the ‘raw Slavic people’ from the East. Was that a conscious decision?

Thomas: There was never an invocation of any stereotype or cliché of 'raw Slavic people.' The title of the show was more fun than that, it was taken from an ODB (Ol' Dirty Bastard) song. The images are, however, raw and direct. Slava and Boris Mikhailov were the touchstones in terms of image-making for the curation of the show. And indeed, these two photographers seem to have considerable influence on the younger generation you see in this show, they are raw and playful at the same time. For me as a curator it is quite difficult: How do you name this place that is the Post-Eastern-Bloc and has now broken into lots of different countries and separated cultures? The Eastern Bloc was not only geographically isolated until the early 1990s but also culturally, politically, socially, on so many levels. The younger generation of photographers is playing with that narrative. Marie’s generation is probably the first generation to actually travel outside the Eastern Bloc. The “opening” is not even one generation old.

Marie: I left Czech Republic when I was 26 years old and came back eight years later. I remember thinking that it’s interesting how you could still feel the communist times there. It’s still there: In the people, in the mood, in the attitude. It felt quite strange to come back.

BB: You were born in Czechoslovakia, which became the Czech Republic in 1993. Did you have the impression your childhood was confined?

Marie: I was almost five when the Iron Curtain fell, so I don’t remember any immediate difference in the small town on the outskirts we lived in. I am originally from Mikulov, which is ten minutes away from the Austrian border. You can be in Vienna in an hour but to Prague it takes you almost three hours. I remember going to amazing exhibitions and museums in Vienna with my mom. In that sense my childhood was quite open. However, at the same time when I was a student there were no real exchange programs at university, doing an Erasmus exchange was not common back then. We lived in a bubble: There was no Instagram, Netflix or Youtube. The US culture was not as dominant as it is today with all these digital devices. When I came to the US, I didn’t understand many of the cultural references, I only knew Sex & The City from TV.

BB: You photographed these in the early 2000s. How did they end up in the exhibition “Live for the Weather” at the Czech Centre?

Marie: In 2005 I got a phone that could take pictures, which was something totally new. I was the only one in my group of friends with that amazing technology! I just photographed everything around me for fun, the pictures were a personal visual archive of lovers, breakups, basically anything happening to us. I always had a special urge for documenting my immediate surroundings.

Thomas: These images correspond perfectly with the saying “live for the weather”, live for the moment, be young, be happy, be sad. If it’s raining, put on a coat, if it’s sunny, put on a T-Shirt. I think this is what it means to be young: Everything is in that moment.

BB: How did you end up doing photography?

Marie: I wanted to be an artist and studied painting; I never thought photography would be my medium. I have a master’s degree as a painter. But my time in art school was horrible. When I finished, I swore to myself that I would never paint again.

BB: Why?

Marie: My professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Brno was not encouraging or helpful at all. It was all about bohemian life; we didn’t learn much, and we were just hanging out and painting in the atelier. Some guys were even watching porn there, the overall atmosphere was very patriarchal and sexist. Art school didn’t introduce us to curators or taught us how to approach galleries or how to write an application for an artist grant. But art students should know how to write a good CV, how to write their artist statement or that participating in open calls and applying for exhibitions is crucial. There was just no practical side of the education. I finished when I was 26 and was like: Fuck, what the hell am I going to do now?

BB: What would be your advice for other young art students in the same situation?

Marie: If you are unhappy and know what you want: Change your focus on the things you want to do. If you don’t know what you want: Buy yourself time to figure it out.

BB: And what did you do?

Marie: I finished my degree and decided to go to the US as an Au Pair in North Carolina. I needed time to figure out what to do next. Coming from a small town like Mikulov, which has a population of about 8.000 people, where everybody knows everybody, your identity is already boxed in in a way.  Even in your own head. In the US I realized: I could be whoever I wanted to. It was a new beginning. This freedom was extremely exciting and scary at the same time.

BB: How did you end up in New York?

Marie: Being an Au Pair was an interesting experience. The kids were at school most of the time so I had lots of time to explore the new culture and devote myself to writing. Everything was so new to me and I was fascinated by how big everything was: Big streets, big coffee, huge highways. After my first year in North Carolina, I moved to another family in upstate New York. I had the weekends off, so I enjoyed going to the city every weekend and visiting the Metropolitan Museum. It was the only place I knew and you could get in for only a dollar. The second weekend at the Met Museum I met Thomas. I saw he was giving a museum talk and I just joined the group. I was so fascinated by everything he said. At the end of his talk I asked him for a phone number and we went to see different exhibitions every weekend after that. It became our routine for many years.

BB: And how did you find your way to photography?

Marie: I never considered photography as a medium I could work with in a serious manner because I hadn’t studied it. In the Czech Republic the cultural scene is still very focused on academic achievement. If you never studied photography, you can’t possibly be good at it. I had my revelation when I saw Francesca Woodman’s exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum: I just stood there, speechless and overwhelmed. For the first time in my life I thought: Why did I never try photography? I decided to sign up for evening classes at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan and started to take photographs. I was 27, 28 years old back then and I slowly started to get good feedback for my work. I never thought I would end up with photography, but it turned out to be the thing I love the most.

BB: Today, nine years later, you are known for your unique visual signature. How are you labelled in the US, as a Czech artist or as European?

Marie: For some reason, in the US the name “Czechoslovakia” still resonates a bit more than Czech Republic. And usually, the articles introduce me as a Czech artist, nationality always comes up. But I am almost never labelled as a European artist.

Thomas: I must say that as an art historian (or just as a person) I am still a bit disturbed when someone says, “This is a French artist / a black artist / a female artist / a trans artist” and puts them in a box based only on one aspect of their identity. This happens a lot with feminism as well. When Marie started doing her self-portrait series, she was suddenly seen as a “feminist artist”, probably because she is female. But her work isn’t predominantly about feminism. It’s about empowering women and people.

Marie: I think all this labelling is interesting and worth thinking about a bit. I am Czech but my work is not only about being Czech. I am an immigrant, a female artist, which definitely shapes my work a lot but it is not just that. There are layers to all of it and labeling the work limits it's potential.

BB: You didn’t leave the US for eight years before visiting Europe again. How do you perceive the Czech art scene?

Marie: When I went back in 2018 and started to re-connect with the cultural scene in Prague, I was quite surprised by some things. The big difference between the art scenes in the Czech Republic and New York is that Czech artists are used to being paid properly as artists. This sounds obvious but coming from New York it’s really not. In the Czech Republic you have a governmental cultural structure that supports the scene with grants, networks, programs and the funding of the European Union.

BB: And in New York?

Marie: In New York things are more about exposure. You are "paid" by being in a magazine, in a show, in a collection – but not always in cash. In the Czech Republic you get the exposure and the money. Of course, the exposure is not as great as in New York, that’s why New York can ride on this kind of wave of subtle exploitation. But a lot of people I speak to in the Czech Republic are shocked that artists elsewhere sometimes don’t even get money for their expenses. There is a lot of pressure in the Czech art scene to keep it that way, which I totally support.

BB: How is the Czech art scene doing during Covid-19?

Marie: Not being in Czech right now, it is hard to say for me. But before Covid-19 the art scene was doing well, even though it’s changing, everybody is trying not to pay you if they can get away with it, but there is a lot of pressure from the artists, the community and the union to reward artists for their work. The only thing is: Artists struggle a little bit to get exposure outside of the Czech Republic. I think it’s working quite well inside the country, but since it’s very small it’s hard to get recognition outside. You can bring famous Czech artists to New York and many people have never heard of them in the US. It’s important to give artists exposure outside their own country.

BB: So more cross-border cooperation is needed?

Marie: Definitely. The world is global.

Thomas: More cooperation is always needed, more support, more identification with others, more value placed on art and humanities as a means of connecting with what it means to be human.

BB: Thank you for your time.

Interview: Ana-Marija Cvitic

More about Marie Tomanova’s work:

Instagram: @marietomanova

Contact: www.marietomanova.com

(C) 27/11/2020

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