Prague-based filmmaker Helena Třeštíková has been filming marriage stories since the early 1980s, resulting in several long-term documentaries. Ivana and Václav’s everlasting marriage covenant is the subject of observation in this episode, which ranges from the day before the wedding to the present day. Back then, in December 1980, Ivana is 21 years old and Václav 24. Both study architecture and marry “because we like each other. And other things. Things better not talked about.” The first child is born shortly after the wedding. Třeštíková is obviously attracted to certain places she keeps returning to, but mostly to people and the way they try to give their lives meaningful directions. In this “Marriage Story”, we discern an incredible desire for expansion and growth which becomes evident in an accumulation of objects, children and responsibilities – one of the underlying motives of the Strnads’ marriage which gradually unfolds over 35 years together.

Carolin Weidner, DOK Leipzig Catalogue 2017

 

A transmedia documentary based on three years of research on the Murg river, this work takes its shape in a manner inspired by the river itself. Images and sounds flow from one piece to another, forming a documentary that is alive rather than set in time and bound to a single frame. “Becoming River” has many parts, four of which are exhibited here. Two 2-channel video installations (FLUSSORAKEL and STAU/FALL) share the same surfaces and run in a continuous loop. FLUSSKINO is a selection of documentaries, fictions and performances filmed along the river. HYDROSPHÄRE is a sculpture of video monitors that give an insight into the flow of the Murg. SCHWEMMLAND is a sound installation based on live data sent from a probe on the Murg.

By flowing through different media and projects, documenting the river for its nature, people and various identities, the piece becomes an investigation of a body over time, and the diversity by which one may be described.

Dana Melaver

Nearly every day in Isla Tibaguin, Philippines, the streets turn into rivers. Environmental disasters can take many forms, and this immersive documentary follows a slow-motion climate crisis that is daily and constant. In Isla Tibaguin, the water rises everywhere and it takes hours to subside, leaving residents wading in water. Cooking, cleaning, trying to study, all in water. The film follows Riri and Angie as they navigate life with and within floodwater, emphasising the significance of community in the face of climate instability and uncertainty.

The use of the immersive medium allows audiences to face this particular climate disaster first-hand, and to feel the anxiety which ensues. Within the virtual reality headset, viewers experience a mediated feeling of being within floodwater, in a manner which two-dimensional media cannot replicate. By employing the intimacy of VR, the film makes a slow and more invisible catastrophe feel like the emergency that it actually is.

Dana Melaver

As though on automatic, passersby walk the same path; one day indistinguishable from the other. Until a surprise encounter ruptures this everyday. There is a secret world in the central train station, one eerily similar to our own, but just off enough to destabilise reality. In this unassuming monolith there is a gateway to another world, or rather a story that takes place overlaid unto a glitch of reality. Viewers will encounter their own bodies disrupted, and peak into a strange encounter. And then, in the end, it will loop and start again.

In a unique approach to immersion, the piece not only toys with our own feeling of body and the shape of reality, but as well with the body and shape of virtual reality. By extending virtual immersion into the shape of a reflecting sculpture (rather than a headset), the work opens the door to portals of many shapes and sizes. Keep an eye out for the not-so-familiar and slide into the unexpected.

Dana Melaver

The only permanence in life is the absolute promise of decay. Decomposition is just change, and everything in this world, digital images included, are not exempt from demise. Yet it is their mortality that makes pictures all the more precious, and this work aims to highlight the beauty therein. Deterioration is inevitable, and in this work its pace lies in the hands of visitors.

Using photographs from the public domain, the work also calls into question the digital archive. Is the archive a space of permanence or is it merely a state of slow decay? The images are ones of public significance but of no sentimental value to the audience. Therefore the act of decaying images has no personal bearing. This relationship might change, though, once visitors upload their own photographs and become witnesses to their decomposition...

Dana Melaver

“The future is a relative concept. It’s up to us to imagine it.” How right that well-coiffed television show host is, who toasts a possibly colourful future in black and white – at a time when people first set foot on the moon and tanks invade Prague, both with unforeseeable consequences. For who can really know how people will live in a few decades. When Petr begins a diary in 1974 on the day of his wedding with Jana in Prague, he has no idea how the world and his little family universe will develop – and how they will influence each other. When shortly afterwards Helena Třeštíková begins to follow Jana’s pregnancy with her camera, she has no idea that 37 years later this will become her longest-running long-term documentary so far: “Private Universe”. Petr’s diary entries provide the variable structure of this consistently light-handed family portrait. From the diary perspective, great political upheavals sometimes look like marginal notes, first teeth like major events. The changes in Czech society are traced on a small scale – a life between Karel Gott and John Lennon. The full dimension of the film’s title, however, becomes evident only when son Honza, the rebellious one, gradually turns into the actual protagonist. At the hour of his birth 37 years ago, he had no idea that he was already under the camera’s star. A lucky star? 

Lars Meyer, DOK Leipzig Catalogue 2012

In 1989, Helena Třeštíková begins to film the juvenile prisoner René. She follows the rhythm of his life for almost twenty years, a life spent in prisons, interrupted only by brief periods of freedom. Twenty years in which epoch-making upheavals unroll, in which systems, forms of government and regimes change – hinted at by television images that filter into René’s cell. The stagnation and absence of tempo “inside” is juxtaposed with a restless “outside” where René is moving in squares, at stations and in trains – without ever arriving anywhere. The link between inside and outside is the director herself, who becomes the only reliable constant in her protagonist’s life. A contradictory, up-and-down relationship that René reflects on in his letters to Třeštíková. Read out by him, they add another layer to the film in which the filmmaker virtually becomes the second protagonist. René, who with her help goes on to become a successful writer himself, turns out to be an equal, but difficult partner, drastically demanding her attention and questioning the relationship between filmmaker and protagonist again and again. The attempts to make him the co-author of this film are part of the story. A story of overwhelming power that goes right where it hurts.

Helena Třeštíková won the 2008 Golden Dove in Leipzig for “René”.

Grit Lemke, DOK Leipzig Catalogue 2008

The miracle of birth in close-up. Třeštíková’s first observational documentary marks the starting point of a long-term study that is to last 37 years and culminate in the film “Private Universe”. Her distinctive style is already evident in this intimate miniature – the portrait of a young woman preparing for motherhood emerges in just a few scenes. Třeštíková won the 1975 Golden Dove in Leipzig for “The Miracle”.

Lina Dinkla

A dark room is so much more than it first seems. With patience and curiosity, it will come to life. In between four walls is a Cuban household, filled with objects passed down over generations that hold memories of the hands that kept them. As one walks through the room and interacts with its objects, the space begins to come alive. Visitors will take their own time and make their own way through the quiet evidence of a lived-in space, uncovering hidden moments waiting to be found.

Over the course of the piece, a clock runs a day in fast forward, and the room shape-shifts from the 1980s to 1990s and onwards, slowly, steadily, almost unnoticed. Time moves differently here. It is a piece that lives in the in-between, in the narrow space that treads the line of physical and virtual and in the cracks that separate days, years and decades. And it is precisely this in-betweenness that cultivates portals and the possibility of walking through a door and into a past waiting to be touched.

Dana Melaver

“Are we still in normal life or is this emergency life?” asks Tom, one of the protagonists. A flood separates a life in two – one before and one after. In this work we encounter people affected by the 2022 floods in eastern Australia, as they recall the moments in which everything changed. Described through miniature rooms, the piece recreates lost objects and spaces, rooms formed of memories. Beautifully and consciously crafted, the piece invokes a creative approach that radiates care, for participating collaborators, for audiences, and in the making process.

The project, centered on a virtual reality experience and including augmented reality components as well as workshops, was created in collaboration with people affected by the flooding. As the project continues to grow, it becomes a living archive of restoration, reviving lost objects. Like ducklings reappearing after a flood, life – albeit changed – does go on.

Dana Melaver

A disturbing documentation of forced displacement in the West Bank, centered on first-person accounts of Palestinians under constant pressure by Israeli forces and settlers. The film is made of both 360° footage as well as vernacular images captured by locals and activists over a period of three years. While a documentation of violence, the film also shows humanity in the face of inhumanity, led by people whose homes were destroyed and whose communities continue to be impacted. It documents violence but also poetry, compassion and resilience. The project also critically considers the viewer's perspective – it invites the audience to experience the topic first-hand, whilst at the same time making conscious decisions of what to show and what not to show in immersive view.

The piece is accompanied by images taken in the West Bank by the photo collective Activestills, of which the two directors are members. There are also volunteers on site to offer emotional support and conversation.

Dana Melaver

A duet for two church organs, played by AI-driven robots, and a score composed live with the audience. In this site-specific installation, visitors are invited to both guide and experience a composition which collapses time and flips musical traditions on their head.

The two organs of the Heilandskirche have only been played by human hands, but that’s about the change. Trained on two edges of a musical spectrum – on music from the European Middle Ages, and contemporary electronic music – the AI players imagine hypothetical musical realities somewhere in between. As visitors enter the space, they begin to explore an invisible map, which conducts the AI players in one musical direction or another in search of a musical bridge between past and present. Ever-changing and unique, the piece is a singular audio experience felt with the entire body, and the body, in return, guides this musical composition. Played twice only, for three hours at a time, nothing is pre-determined nor repeated.

Dana Melaver