My Room: Future Present Past
The kernel of this exhibition may be actually two—dual, dizygotic, embryotic—it is place and time; it is osmotic slippage or movement. It is a search, a memory, a return. It is a discovery of self and of past—it is a reckoning with the present and the enigma of the future. This is all distilled, or contained, in Marie Tomanova’s teenage bedroom, the essence of this exhibition, and a crucial nexus of her identity. It is a place that stores not only the content of her practice as a photographer or artist, but also her youthful dreams and fears. It is the place where she began to search for herself, a process she continued when she left the Czech Republic in 2011 for the United States, and after her return home in 2018. It is an unfinished process, and one in which she is still engaged—her transformations, her identity, continue. The exhibition at Prostějov contains objects, drawings, family snapshots, and journal entries, all that were stored in her teenage bedroom in Mikulov, Czech Republic. It also includes printed and previously exhibited photographs from Tomanova’s photographic work created in New York City of youths, with which she identified, taken from her Young American (2015-18) and New York New York (2019-2021) series. Against the very personal background of her own youth, emblematized by her bedroom, these works, which are stored, archived, in this same room, speak to the multiplicity of identities, the development and dreams for the self.
Tomanova’s work, since her initial foray into photography in the United States in 2012, has been about touching the soil of her youth, her past, her home. This is most conspicuously seen in her Self-Portraits in Nature (2014-) in which her nude—not naked—body is photographed in contact with nature. In Untitled (Self-Portrait) (2016), for example, the image is about the feeling of the embrace of the earth, of the roots of a tree—Tomanova’s body literally covered in dirt and pine needles. This image, taken in Oregon before she could travel back home to the Czech Republic, was a way for her to commune with her past, with her time spent as a child playing in the dirt, time with her family in the afternoons tending the fields. It is about touching home. It is also in-line with her earlier painting practice which tends, expressionistically, toward self-representation in nature, but unlike that work, as can be seen in the photograph, Paintings (2019), it is not sexualized or emotionally traumatic feeling. It is calm.
Tomanova’s earlier painting practice, stemming from the years she was at art school, exhibits a psyche shaped by fears, relationships, youthful abandon and energy, and perhaps death—her father dying two days before her 16thbirthday, before she had a chance to receive the Dalí book he had gotten for her—likely affecting her later artistic output both with brush and camera. In the second image from her Youth is Dark (2005/2011; 2022) film shows her looking at a skull—it is a momento mori, a vanitas. An image of multiple dead butterflies from this same series Butterfly Wings (2010), seems to expand the simple momento mori of the skull into the colorful expression of self—vibrant and in love with the natural world—an interpretation buoyed by a third image from this sequence, Untitled (2007), which shows Tomanova with a temporary tattoo of a butterfly on her hand. Presented almost specimen-like, the image of a butterfly reverberates with meaning not only in how Tomanova self-represents in her painting or dress, but in its objecthood—in the “truth” of the object itself—an aspect that creates a foundational layer for this exhibition in Prostějov.
In the 2024 feature-length documentary film, World Between Us, by director Marie Dvořáková, Tomanova is filmed the day of her first return to Mikulov—December 17, 2018—after eight years away living in the United States and hitherto unable to return home. She is in her childhood bedroom going through her things when she comes across a sweater her father used to always wear. She tries it on and marvels, “I thought he was bigger.” This simple comment summarizes the slippage between memory and perception—the difficulty with remembrance. Tomanova then takes a photograph of herself in this sweater outside at the back of the family property, in the snow dusted field. This image, the title of which is, In Dad’s Sweater (All That is Left) (2018), is a key image of her body of work developed during this first two weeks home, It Was Once My Universe, which was shown at the Rencontres d’Arles, France in 2021, and was also the subject of a book by the same name published by Super Labo in 2022.
In Prostějov, Tomanova wants to increase the agency of this photograph of her wearing her father’s sweater and she does it through the inclusion of the sweater itself, draped over the back of a chair, with the Arles photograph resting on the seat, perpendicular to its “correct” landscape orientation. This sculptural install, Dad’s Sweater and Chair (2025) is more complicated than it at first appears. The chair itself is one in which Tomanova photographed herself shaving her head in a photograph, Maruška in Hayloft (2021) during her Artist Residency Dílna in Mikulov, in which she took photos with her mother daily over the period of 30 days and from which they each edited a body of work that was then exhibited titled World Between Us (the genesis of Dvořáková’s documentary title). Moreover, Maruška in Hayloft is the first image of a diptych with Awaiting (2021), which shows the chair empty, draped with the towel Tomanova had been wearing when shaving her head—presence and absence, father and hair—ultimately, the shift in life conception of self brought about by change.
This act of removing hair is symbolic of many things, including a sense of penitence, rebirth, cleansing. Photographer Ryan McGinley writes nicely on this in the Introduction to Tomanova’s first book Young American by Paradigm Publishing (2019),
“Marie has a shaved head, similar to Sinead O’Connor in the late 80’s, Sigourney Weaver in 1991, or even Britney Spears in 2007. Some say Britney shaved her head to kill an identity and be reborn. When Marie Tomanova made her way from a small farm in the Czech Republic to the East Village, and filmed herself shaving her head, was she reborn?”
McGinley rightly characterizes this shaving of her head with a re-configuration of identity upon moving to New York City, and Tomanova’s Self-Portrait 2008/2021 (2021) emphasized this re-configuration in an image that combines two self-portraits taken in the same place in her childhood home, years apart—referencing place and time. Self-Portrait 2008/2021 was the title image from a 2022 exhibition, Nothing Compares to You, Brno at OFF/Format Gallery in Brno Czech Republic, which took as its theme the return to Brno, the site of Tomanova’s early struggles as an artist within a studio led by a misogynist, and an art program that favored a largely academic painting style. Her return to Brno, with shaved head and international career, was a vindication, of sorts.
This image, a picture within a picture, could be the starting point for the emphasis and power given to the object, the artifact, the thing itself in the works on display in Prostějov, all of which resided in and were taken for this exhibition from Tomanova’s teenage bedroom in Mikulov, Czech Republic. The other component, the journals (also from Tomanova’s room), are likely inspired by a 2012 Francesca Woodman exhibition Tomanova viewed at the Guggenheim that purportedly inspired her to start photography in earnest. Perhaps even more than Woodman’s photographs, Tomanova claims to have been inspired by Woodman’s journals.
While Woodman’s journals were included at the Guggenheim as secondary, as text descriptions accompanying photographs, at Prostějov, Tomanova has elevated her journal entries to exist side-by-side with photographs and drawings created between the years 2009 and 2023. Presented as a 32-piece group installed on a pink background to echo the color of her self-painted bedroom, these images trace a text, image, and object-based archaeology of self, a self that struggled to come to terms with itself in that room and beyond, a struggle with which many people may relate. The title of Paul Gauguin’s 1897-8 painting comes to mind, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? Tomanova’s constellation of self exhibited in this group of pieces, however, is not an abstract, generalized, and thus, distant statement such that suggested by Gauguin’s title but significantly, one directly related to herself, specific, psychologically revealing, and profoundly personal. But perhaps, in addition to uncovering the layers of Tomanova herself, it may also give the sensitive viewer insight into themself.
While mostly not directly connected by date, time, or description of a specific image, the journal entries, like the archival family snapshots also included, are a means of lending primacy to the objects themselves and creating an environment reflective of Tomanova’s space, her home, her room, a place where all these things continue to still exist. This strategy, of perhaps archiving the archive, or drawing out Tomanova’s personal history of certain objects is one she has employed repeatedly throughout her artistic output in the Czech Republic. The result is a web of related meanings that build on one another that are directly connected to personal history—it is a self-portrait, of sorts. For example, several of the images in the It Was Once My Universe series build and interlock in this way. Family Picture c. 1997 (2018) is another one of these images of an image—in this case, an image of a framed family photograph showing Tomanova with her family. Her hair is short, her father is present, and so is her mother. A second image, My Hair, My Sister’s Hair (2019) shows an open drawer with the locks of hair that were removed as a deal with her father. Again, there is presence and absence, hair, father. The photograph, the framed family shot, and Tomanova’s image of it are both testaments to that which was—that fragmentary moment of what was in front of the camera at that time, which is no longer there, except for the physicality of the photograph itself. As such, Tomanova reveals the visceral power of the photograph, particularly for those who have a relationship to it, family, loved ones, as Barthes might claim in Camera Lucida (1980) as a powerful aspect of the photograph. But through creating an image, a photograph, of that family photograph, Tomanova—as an artist—increases, or extends, the vibrancy, the meaning of that family snapshot far outside the circle of her family and into the world.
These objects—Dad’s sweater, snapshots, chairs, journal entries—are not simply archive, although they certainly contain that element, they are means of drawing the viewer more deeply into Tomanova’s orbit, herself, her room. They are connectors to who she is—who she has been and who she will be.
—Professor Thomas Beachdel, Ph.D.