The installation entitled “She who looks back” brings us the stories of two women photographers who have lived their lives in different geopolitical environments - Anna Strickland in the USA and Judita Csaderova in Slovakia - but who nevertheless have much in common. The common denominator of the installation is the photograph through which they reconstruct their life story, looking back into the past.

This medium of "photography, which is capable of infinitely repeating what happened only once and which is a mechanical repetition of what can never in existence happen again" (Roland Barthes: La Chambre Clair), is for both artists a unique means of investigating their own identity. In these series of photographs - family photographs, photographs of important events in the past as well as those taken by the artists themselves - the images are frozen moments of life in which the personal, the unique and the unrepeatable often take place against the background of history. But the installation, where the photograph functions essentially as a mirror (a view upon oneself) also includes other elements - items relating to the personal lives of the female ancestors. These items - correspondence, texts, sounds, excerpts from conversations - are the memory of the gender, an experience, a making present of the past. The energy of these items - linked to a particular human life (as is the photograph) - are, however, more than a document. For both artists it is a means of self-analysis and self-identification.

Maria Oriskova