Notes From Libuše Jarcovjáková

The organisation and shaping of this career-spanning showcase, simply titled Libuše Jarcovjáková,¹ was taken on by the (external from the National Gallery’s perspective) curator Lucie Černá. Not only did she pick out the works and choose their print formats, she also ordained a coherent structure of installation sub-sections, for which she produced accompanying texts. The survey of six hundred works in the photographer’s first ever comprehensive exhibition managed to be dynamic despite in fact being ordered chronologically. This was helped along not only by the alternating of differently structured scenes (grouped more loosely or tightly), but also by the rawness of the snapshots themselves. One can’t help but recall something Václav Havel once said of the manuscripts of Třešnák’s earliest stories from the 1970s; something to the effect that though he’s got a mistake in nearly every sentence, he’s still more interesting than the writers who don’t make a single one…

The exhibitions and publications that Lucie Černá has prepared to date from Libuše Jarcovjáková’s archives and contemporary work have both stood on their own and formed a dialogue. Thanks to a continuity, the individual phases (and the dominant themes within them) have built on each other and gradually formed a visual autobiography. Let us mention here at least the photographic volumes of the editor’s collection, untitled: Evokativ (2019), Supersonico (2022–2023), T–Club (2022, 2024), as well as the fact that, leading up to Christmas 2019, The Guardian declared Evokativ, shown at the festival in Arles, the top photography exhibit of the year. Yet this new staging (nearly three times the scale) did not come across as an inevitable or predictable next step.

On the occasion of the publication of the artist’s diaries, Josef Chuchma offered a fitting characterisation of the author’s work in issue 29 of Fotograf magazine under the headline Libuše Jarcovjáková – Book of Life: “the photographs were ‘merely’ part of her unceasing visual and textual documentation of her own life’s journey, which she herself long considered nothing more than stumbling through life, without discipline, order or purpose. Jarcovjáková is not a documentarian, she is ‘merely’ a visual-textual stenographer of her world, her sensations.”² The artist herself echoed this statement: “It’s not about what’s in the picture, but about the feeling.”³ This is why we can leave out naming the individual blocks of the retrospective. A good half of the pieces were self-portraits anyhow. The compositional principle of the installed monograph is indicated by the stand-alone chapter Rooms and Beds, which presents more recent additions to a body of work spanning four decades that document places the photographer spent the night.⁴  

The impression ultimately left by Jarcovjáková’s retrospective is not driven by awe at the treatment of individual shots that stand out, say, for their composition or her eye for the defining moments in each exposure… Any particular photogeny is outweighed by the whole, grounded in the curator’s interpretation. In entrusting the same custodian with stylisation of her personal message for eight years, the author clearly considers her a collaborative voice. She took a similar approach with the screen adaptation of her photographs, leaving the sequencing and rhythm of the feature-length cinematic piece I’m Not Everything I Want to Be to director Klára Tasovská and her team. This trust in her considerably younger colleagues facilitates a  reframing of Libuše Jarcovjáková’s work – not as it was perceived at the time it was produced,⁵ but as a story of searching for one’s identity, indeed a kind of intimate confession.

Libuše Jarcovjáková 
Veletržní palác Národní Galerie Praha 
27.9.2024 – 30.3.2025

Všechny fotografie: Libuše Jarcovjáková, foto: Adéla Kremplová

Text: Josef Moucha