(2012- ongoing)
A time-based project exploring the unique and often complex interconnections between four generations of women within my family, where each film stages a small family ritual, sometimes combined with documentary style dialogue, exploring the bonds between the women while also touching on the hidden issues and concerns of the family’s past. The intimate personal histories are inevitably interwoven with the crucial historical events of the past hundred years of the Czech Republic. My approach is informed by my research into the communication of embodiment in the moving image, while using multi-sensory aesthetics.
Written text about the project:
https://tangibleterritory.art/journal/issue-5-content/10-years-of-4-generations-of-women/
https://thelearnedpig.org/tereza-stehlikova-4-generations-of-women-topography/10001
https://alchemyfilmandarts.org.uk/four-generations-of-women-tereza-stehlikova/
Selected films from the ongoing series:
From my Roots (2020)
Water Rituals (2018)
Between Jirina and Anna (2015)
Summer Rituals (2014)
FAMILIAL TRACES, Sternstudio gallery, Vienna, Austria
A multi-media exhibition tracing and mapping some of the textures that make up the narrative of oneself: a fragile and ever-shifting construct made of embodied memories, fragments of early childhood experience, imprints of tactile encounters, threaded with complex family histories. The exhibition builds on the artist’s ongoing research into sensory perception, embodiment, and the liminal space where internal and external topography intertwine.
FROM YOU TO ME: 4 GENERATIONS OF WOMEN
Tereza Stehlíková
Sat 26 January – Friday 8 February 2019
Yeomans, 53 High Street, Hawick, TD9 9BP, UK
“Every mother contains her daughter in herself and every daughter her mother, and every woman extends backwards into her mother and forwards into her daughter. This participation and intermingling gives rise to that peculiar confusion as regards to time: woman lives earlier as a mother and later as a daughter.” C G Jung
Tereza Stehlíková’s From You to Me: 4 Generations of Women is an ongoing project exploring the unique and complex interconnections between four generations of women within the artist’s own family.
Tereza’s collection of short experimental films, beginning in 2011, capture the unique moments of her grandmother, her mother, her daughter and herself reuniting between the Czech Republic and Britain over several years. Documentary-style dialogue is combined by Tereza with staged family rituals exploring the bonds between the women, while also uncovering issues of hidden family histories.
Shown with Alchemy Film & Arts in an installation of six films, Tereza creates an entrance to the world of the four women, temporarily materialising memory through immersive projection and questioning the tangibility of memory itself.
The collection of 6 films:
Game of Rituals (2.53)
Chvalkov 2016 (2.42)
Between Jirina and Anna (4:43)
From You to Me (8.31)
Chvalkov 2017 (5.48)
Water Rituals (22.35)
Absolute Now group exhibition, at Atsukobarouh gallery, Tokyo, Japan.
September – October 2015
Guy Sherwin, George Barber, Tereza Stehlíková, Kaz, Masayuki Kawai, Rieko Akatsuka
‘Absolute Now’ was a group exhibition which takes the essay, Time and Eternity by D.T. Suzuki, as a starting point to examine the universal concept of time and its relationship to eternity. The essay is from the book, Oriental Point of View. Suzuki, who introduced Zen Buddhism to the world, spent many years living in the West. The essays in the book examine Japan and its culture from an objective viewpoint, with the author’s wish to introduce valuable and positive aspects of Japan and the Orient. In Time and Eternity, Suzuki concludes that ‘eternity is absolute now’ and that ‘a moment is eternity’. If this is so, we can stipulate that shifting time is made up of multiple absolute nows. The medium of moving image is structured from multiple still images over time to create an illusion of movement. In this exhibition, four artists from the UK and two from Japan will each present a new work which makes use of the moving image, such as video and film.
Tereza Stehlíková 