Curated by Thomas Beachdel
That person I used to be in that bedroom feels so far away. Yet, I can still feel her inside of me.
—Marie Tomanova
In its simplest form, the generating idea for Marie Tomanova’s exhibition at the Muzeum Prostějov for the Festival of Contemporary Art 2025 is the space of her teenage—and sometimes still current—bedroom. In addition to serving as bedroom, the space has become one that has accumulated the photographic archive of Tomanova’s practice. All works in the exhibition are from this room—which has transformed, like Tomanova herself. Like that of many people, her bedroom serves as a sort of collector of self or, perhaps more importantly, selves. The self-painted pink room was the locus of Tomanova’s identity growing up, with its band flyers, paintings she produced, ephemera, and even traces of drawings directly on the walls.
As a space, it is where she stored her clothes, her journals, and the attempts to discover who she really was. It was sacred space. It was her space. And it is a space she left, only to return eight years later—the room stayed untouched. On her return in December 2018, she took photographs in this room as part of her It Was Once My Universe project. In these images, the mundane becomes precious, and the once perceived as precious (her old clothes, for example) become reconceived for what they are—worn, dirty, stained, and yet full of memories and past identity; while Tomanova still bodily fits into these clothes, they do not fit her anymore. They are no longer her. They are who she used to be. And yet, they are still a part of her. She may be able to let them go, but she cannot completely discard them.
For the first time in Tomanova’s practice, it becomes sculptural, combing elements of the room, including clothing, with photographs. It also becomes even more personal, intimate. Tomanova creates an installation showing unseen family snapshot photographs in juxtaposition with journal entries, drawings, and her own photographs. The passage of time and memory are critical themes, as well as place and displacement. Works from her seminal Young American (2015-2018) are shown alongside or in contrast with works from New York New York (2019-21), It Was Once My Universe (2018-19) and World Between Us (2021), a photography project she performed with her mother and from which Director Marie Dvořáková borrowed as the name of her documentary film on Tomanova (HBO, 2024). The exhibition includes looped projections of two short films, Live for the Weather (2005-11, 2017) and Youth Is Dark (2005-11, 2022) consisting of imagery Tomanova created in the Czech Republic, before leaving for NYC.
The artist’s studio has long been a site of fascination and as a means of understanding or reading their individual psyches—perhaps most famously that disheveled and cramped space of Francis Bacon, which served as sort of stand-in for a certain unordered genius. Tomanova’s intimate space of childhood, however, is a much less performative sort of space, particularly as it contains aspects of both her private and public life, something she brings together, overlaps, and mixes in this exhibition. Andy Warhol had his studio at the Factory on Union Square but lived uptown on E. 66th Street; two very separate worlds. Tomanova has her little pink bedroom—it is everything…still…her future, her present, her past.
—Thomas Beachdel