Circles

(2014–2019)

Clock (2019)

Clock (2019), moving image, sound, 31 sec.

Untitled #1, from the Evolve series (2014)

Untitled #1, from the Helena’s Things series (2014)

Curatorial text for the Circles series written by Thomas Beachdel

“… truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction.”

―George Bataille

“It looked like a small snake with very kind eyes and a smiling mouth. This snake was eating itself, with its very sweet smile and there was no blood. Only pink flesh everytime it bit itself.”

―Bara Prášilová, Dream #131

Bára Prášilová’s Circles has no beginning or end, before or after. There is a perfection in Prášilová’s photographs—clean, energetic, bright, in saturated colors—that evoke the Platonic, the symmetrical, the great dreams of an ideal world, proportionate, seamless, and sublimely measured and precise, which somehow give order and ease. But this notion of the circle, the sphere, the divinely harmonic, is a lie. Beneath Prášilová’s surfaces lurks the uncanny—a psychology of emotional crevices and cracks. The valleys and paths are deep into ourselves in Prášilová’s images. They take us to childhood, like steps down into the cellar, and they take us to the attic garret of our dreams of flight. There is a Bachelardian reverie here—a daydream that avoids the night. We are far from facts and logic, that deceptive myth of the Greco-Roman tradition of the circle, and spun into the more fascinating areas of rhythm and cycle, memory, and our imperfect selves. Like pyramids, their very tips breaking the earth’s crust, volcanic, echoes of our molten psyches like slow- moving rivers transforming the landscape of remembrance, the past and dreams of future visions rupture the skin of our reality, ripping, perhaps ever so gently, the complex fabric of our rational minds. The visual artist's imaginative photographs are created as carefully planned productions which are based on sketches and include props that she designs and often makes herself. Beneath a finely wrought veneer, the snake eats its tail. The beauty is convulsive, magical, sudden, and veiled. On the brink of the deceptive, the unreal, Prášilová’s work causes us to question ourselves and the nature of photography itself as, in the words of Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida (1981), “Every photograph is a certificate of presence.” Prášilová’s work generates a profound idea of dream, self, and photography that goes far beyond the image itself. Does a photo have to be “taken” to exist? Or is a photo, at its core, an act of seeing or remembering that gets affixed to the mind as a memory? Where is “truth?”

―Thomas Beachdel

Installation view of the solo exhibition Circles at the Czech Centre Vienna, part of Foto Wien festival (2023).

Curated by Thomas Beachdel

Installation view: Circles by Bára Prášilová | Xposure International Photography Festival, UAE (2023)

Curated by Frank Meo