Heroine

Adam Holý exhibits only two photographs at his exhibition “Heroine”. Both work with a basic visual operation: mirroring and reversal. In doing so he references a formal approach that can also be thought of as a reference to a symbolic operation- the act of overturning and doubling. In one of the photos we see the sun shining strangely from the ground instead of the sky. This is at the same level and of the same size, therefore becoming a mirror (A mirror that allows us to see the bends where on roads, not seeing around a corner can be dangerous). The sun is humiliated and tipped over.

In the second of the photographs the model is also turned upside down, turned with her womb towards the sky. Mirroring the scene (the same model appears in the image twice) indicates that she is not real but rather a creature, only an image, delusion, succubare (succubare, “lying below”).

Elements of painterliness and phantomness are also strengthened by the fact that the painter Josef Bolf was asked to prepare the model’s makeup. The third photo, one left unexhibited and only a part of the exhibition as an invitation has been pasted into the graphic character hexagram character Thelema: inciting beliefs created by Aleister Crowley worshiping (sexual) desire. The exhibition is called HEROINE. The heroine in Adam Holý’s conception can be a model who unconditionally and therefore without shame (perhaps initiated by a narcotic substance) allows herself to be guided by the photographer’s will to depict desire as a medium, somewhere outside of herself.

Through references to occultism, popular culture and erotica, Adam Holý indirectly follows the tradition of the American independent filmmaker Kenneth Anger without falling into a cliché where the aesthetics of the occult become combined with only eroticism.

Pavel Sterec