Fever State

The starting point of the exhibition is the intersection of self-representation and image-making at times of personal crises, especially mental and physical challenges. How could image-making strategies be employed to highlight these vulnerable situations? By focusing on stories and experiences that are often questioned, invalidated or regarded as shameful or embarrassing, the exhibition examines how the détournement of these different modes—such as thermal imagery, computer-generated images, X-ray, ultrasound, montage, cellphone snapshots—can be seen as powerful tools in developing personal narratives, making visible what resists perception and fighting epistemic injustice. These imaging technologies/media, often developed within scientific or clinical contexts to get to know, to dissect, reveal and control bodies, are appropriated here to perform and speak otherwise. The invited artists use photography and moving image as forms of intimate, confessional modes of expression, where the practice and process of art-making functions as a kind of “autopatographic” therapy, a form of autobiographical “storytelling” where the author’s own precarity is in the focus. 

The works on view and the accompanying events subvert the authority of the medical gaze, which has historically been entangled with the patriarchal gaze, and highlight the challenge of describing these questions through normative modes of language. These aspects link the exhibition to Fotograf Zone Festival’s main theme of the politics of language and translation, as the various conditions presented here (from narcolepsy, through Long COVID, to eating disorders) strive to articulate something which does not necessarily have a fixed / stable language and work on finding new vocabularies and rhetorics for it. The artistic positions emphasize the importance of articulating one’s own story and reclaiming agency over how their bodies and experiences are represented. However, the fragmented nature of this mode of storytelling and the impossibility to capture them as a totality is also a characteristic feature of these works. 

Fever in the context of Fever State describes a heightened, unstable state of the body and mind, where illness, vulnerability, and crisis disrupt ordinary experience. It encompasses both literal physiological responses—temperature, pain, and bodily change—and the metaphorical intensity of emotional, cognitive, or existential upheaval. Fever can also function as a coping strategy: physically, by mobilizing the body’s defenses and facilitating healing; mentally, by creating space for reflection, self-awareness, and the processing of trauma or stress. Through photography and moving image, the artists explore these fevered states as sites of resistance, intimate storytelling, and the reclamation of agency when normative language fails. In this way, fever becomes both a subject and a methodology, a lens through which embodied experiences and personal narratives can be made perceptible.

In Fever State, “state” evokes not only a condition but also a kingdom or political territory. As Susan Sontag writes in Illness as a Metaphor:

“Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.”

Here, illness is imagined as a realm with its own rules and structures, a territory in which the body and mind are subject to unfamiliar laws. The exhibition examines how artists inhabit, negotiate, and give form to these invisible yet powerful territories of experience.

FEVER STATE
October 4–12, 2025

ARTISTS
Szilvia Bolla, Leah Clements, Viola Fátyol, Barbara Hammer, Rowena Harris, Phelim Hoey, Magdaléna Kašparová, Barnabás Neogrády-Kiss, Jo Spence, Amos Peled

OPENING PERFORMANCE
Performance: Amos Peled – Phantom Limb, 3. 10. 2025, 7:00 pm

CURATORS
Flóra Gadó and Judit Szalipszki

VENUE
Holešovicke Market, Hall13
Bubenské nábř. 306, 170 00 Praha 7-Holešovice

OPENING HOURS
10:00–18:00