Světlana Malina

#1 min Fotograf Zone

16. 9. 2025

Portrait: Světlana Malina
Portrait: Světlana Malina
#49 Talk TogetherFotograf Zone Festival 2025Curating

ABOUT THE CURATOR

Světlana Malinová

is a curator and Artistic Director of Fotograf Festival in Prague, a position she has held since 2022. Since 2025 she has also been leading Fotograf Gallery and has long been engaged in independent curatorial projects, including at City Surfer Office and Tempo Gallery. Internationally, she has curated projects at SpazioSERRA (Milan) and Pickle Bar (Berlin). Her practice focuses on non-linear narratives in moving image and contemporary visual art, bringing together local and international artists and institutions. She studied at the Department of Photography at FAMU and the Intermedia III Studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague.

She is the curator of the exhibition Metamorphosis, featuring artists Benedetta Casagrande, Vitalii Halanzha, Ksenia Ivanova, Emilia Martin, Anna Orłowska, Balázs Turós, Viktoriia Tymonova, and Yana Wernicke, and the exhibition Ties That Bind , featuring artists Dev Dhunsi, Sasha Chaika, Ihar Hancharuk, Donja Nasseri, and Sheung Yi.

#49 Talk TogetherFotograf Zone Festival 2025CuratingMetamorphosisTies That Bind

#49 Talk Together

This issue explores language – its forms, possibilities, and limits. We look at how we communicate in the digital space, how the language of artificial intelligence changes our notions of creativity, and how visual images can replace words. You will discover why language is never neutral and how it shapes identity, creates inequalities, and opens paths to liberation. The issue features a reflection by bell hooks, the artistic practice of Eszter Magyar, projects documenting the Roma community in Brno, and visual essays by Claudia Larcher and Tabor Robak. The magazine presents language as a tool of communication, power, and resistance and invites you to reflect on what it truly means to talk to one another today.

False Friends

#4 min Fotograf Zone

False Friends

#49 Talk TogetherFotograf Zone Festival 2025Jedna Dva Tři Gallery, Petrohradská kolektiv

Language shapes our world, influences our thoughts, and reflects our societies. In the context of the Balkans, specifically the former Yugoslavia, a region marked by shared histories and divergent narratives, language can both include and exclude. Through the concept of “false friends”, words that appear similar but differ in meaning, this exhibition explores how identity, politics, and cultural memory echo in the language we use, and vice versa. Simply put, we often speak of what we believe are the same notions, not realising we understand them differently. These deceptively familiar terms thus become symbols of regional complexities, miscommunication, and broader cultural and historical tensions.

Fever State

#4 min Fotograf Zone

Fever State

#49 Talk TogetherFotograf Zone Festival 2025Holešovická Tržnice, Hall 13

Illness and vulnerable states of being unsettle the way we know and speak about the body. These conditions—whether chronic or transitory—fracture language, bend perception, time, and resist being neatly contained in existing forms of representation. Fever State emerges from this friction: the struggle to articulate experiences of vulnerability, crisis, and repair when established vocabularies fail. Where we, as diverse, mixed-abled bodyminds with different capacities, cannot align with or adhere to normative concepts of time, space and productivity. Therefore, in the context of the exhibition, images become more than documents; they operate as gestures of resistance, intimate testimonies, and tools for reclaiming agency.