Eastern European grotesque – this time in Prague

The GROTESK project at the 15^th Fotograf Zone festival

Between October 3 and 12, 2025, the Holešovice Market in Prague, Czech Republic is transformed into a buzzing contemporary art venue, serving as the headquarters of the fifteenth edition of the Fotograf Zone Festival. For nearly ten days, an international team of curators and exhibitors offer several contemporary photography exhibitions (in the broadest sense of the term), related performances, guided tours, after-parties, film screenings, and a pop-up bookstore at several locations.

This year, the festival’s concept revolves around the subtitle Talk Together. The program primarily focuses on the possibilities, characteristics and limitations of language, interpersonal communication and its many different forms, whether live or digital. It offers the audience different perspectives on how language shapes our relationships, understanding, and conflicts.

Beyond spoken language, it seeks to emphasize the importance of visual language, which is also part of our everyday lives—especially today, when a GIF or a few emojis can function as a whole sentence in online conversations. All this is explored through photo- and video-based installations throughout Prague, in several cultural centers, pop-up exhibitions, and public spaces, accompanied by lectures, discussions, performances, and other programs. The festival bookstore also sells the issue of #49 Fotograf magazine with the same title, which delves even deeper into the topics raised.

The festival features the works of dozens of international artists and five curated exhibitions. One of these is titled Fever State which takes place in Hall 13 of the Holešovice Market, and is based on the concept by Hungarian curators Flóra Gadó and Judit Szalipszki (featuring artists Bolla Szilvia, Leah Clements, Viola Fátyol, Barbara Hammer, Rowena Harris, Phelim Hoey, Magdaléna Kašparová, Barnabás Neogrády-Kiss, Jo Spence, and Amos Peled). The theme of the exhibition is the intersection of self-representation and image-making during times of personal crisis and mental or physical challenges. Consequently, it deals with profound, intimate topics: from the struggles of teenage eating disorder to a mother’s fear of losing her child, it tells stories of cancer, depression, organic diseases, physical limitations, and fundamental human fears.

The exhibiting artists use photography and video as a confessional form of expression, where the process of making art is present as therapy, centered around the artist’s own existential uncertainty. This is not an easy exhibition to see: these are extremely sensitive, brutally intimate, and infinitely human works of art that deeply shake the viewer with their raw honesty. 

The exhibition Metamorphosis can also be viewed at the same venue. It emerged from an open call by an international platform for European photographers named FUTURES Photography. Metamorphosis focuses on the multi-layered nature of change, examining through the works of eight contemporary artists (Benedetta Casagrande, Vitalii Halanzha, Ksenia Ivanova, Emilia Martin, Anna Orłowska, Balázs Turós, Viktoriia Tymonova, and Yana Wernicke) how change is present in the landscape, the body, memory, narrative, and the finished product itself—the photograph. The selection of the projects was prepared by Emese Mucsi (Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center, Budapest), Raphaëlle Stopin (Centre Photographique Rouen Normandie, France), and the exhibition curator, Světlana Malina (Fotograf Zone, Czech Republic). 

The festival also features a photography project by István Virágvölgyi, curator of the Capa Center, focusing on the unique aesthetics of post-Soviet Eastern European countries. The project consists of a zine entitled GROTESK—The Common Language of Eastern Europe and a four-stage international exhibition series. The zine itself can be browsed in the lobby of Hall 13 of the Holešovice Market, and it can also be viewed as an outdoor pop-up exhibition installed—quite fittingly—with an industrial stapler on the boarded doors and windows of the market’s abandoned Hall 24. The next stop for the project will be OFF Bratislava from November 7—21, so we will have another opportunity to see it live there.

Everyday life in Central and Eastern Europe as a visual tragicomedy

“– Good afternoon.

– Good afternoon.

– How are you?

– Fine, thank you.

– And how is your health?

– I have no complaints.

– But why are you dragging that rope behind you?

– Rope? – I asked, glancing behind me. – Those are my guts.” (István Örkény)

GROTESK is a comprehensive project showcasing contemporary photography from the Central and Eastern European region, created with the support of the International Visegrad Fund – and among other quotes, it includes István Örkény’s One Minute Story, About My Health. The initiative invites viewers to discover the reactions born of the region’s collective memory through the common language of Eastern European countries: the visual dictionary of the grotesque.

According to curator István Virágvölgyi, the project is not merely a presentation of a regional photo collection, but a reflection of a specific way of thinking or a mindset—a visual essay on a survival strategy, a collective coping mechanism. Slovakian photographer Martin Kollár writes the following about his photo series Nothing Special (2001–2004), which appears in the publication: “After the fall of communism, everything in Eastern Europe became chaotic. It was as if we had shaken a bottle full of sediment: the contents became murky, nothing was clear. As the sediment slowly rose to the surface, shapes and meanings began to emerge.” GROTESK tells the story of these meanings: a world where anything can happen without surprising its native sons and daughters—be it a wig fair or a panty market, peacocks as pets, milkmaid and welder records, or, thanks to Romanian photographer Mihai Barbancea, young people making out in bear skins. 

Looking at the pictures, those from the region immediately understand where they are; there is a weirdly comforting sense of homely order emanating from the contrasts and incompatibilities. The oversaturated chaos, the furniture and the wallpaper patterns from the heroic age of socialism, the warm yellowish lights, the colors, the apathetic stares into the camera are all so familiar… We have all seen the glass-fronted cabinets, crystal glasses, denim overalls, and messy bangs that appear on Dita Pepe‘s photos.

We can almost feel the cool touch of the linoleum kitchen floors in the blockhouse apartment buildings photographed by Andrej Balco, and smell the scent of Sunday meat soup nestled in the rugs and Persian-patterned wall hangings of Zuzana Pustaiová and Alexander Chekmenev. Csilla Klenyánszky presents the stereotypes still associated with the female role—from appearances to a fate condemned to housework—with the help of painfully “socialist” lace curtains and nylon stockings. The biased tone is perhaps reinforced by the fact that I am writing this review in socks and slippers and leopard-print sweatpants, surrounded by a pile of unwashed dishes.

Virágvölgyi’s concept relies on Polish historian Jacob Mikanowski’s book Goodbye, Eastern Europe. He describes the former Eastern Bloc as a transitional area that has functioned for centuries as a buffer zone between East and West on the edge of Europe. Due to constant external interventions—by the Tatars, Turks, Germans, and then Russians and Americans—the borders were constantly shifting. All this led to a multitude of internal tensions between neighbors that are still strongly present today, and which the Russian-Ukrainian war has brought back into sharper focus. 

This often miserable fate, and above all, the Soviet influence shaped the common reflexes and connected the mindsets of people living in the region, regardless of the language they speak. Reflexes like the autonomy against oppressive powers, the recognition of opportunities born of chance, the ability to read between the lines, and the bittersweet, self-ironic humor that holds up a mirror to this impossible situation. In other words, this unique perspective can be interpreted as a kind of “alternative socialist realism” – the common language of Eastern European grotesque.

As Mikanowski says, this “prolonged acquaintance with history at its most extreme has given us an extraordinary fluency in the absurd,” Virágvölgyi quotes in his concept. He refers to the works of Franz Kafka, István Örkény, Jaroslav Hašek, Bohumil Hrabal, and Krzysztof Kieślowski, who all used the language of nonsense, the absurd, the bizarre, and the tragicomic as a means of expression. The aim of the GROTESK project is to awaken empathy and nuance the outdated layers of meanings attached to the label “Eastern European identity” so that people focus not only on the negative connotations that developed along the lines of Cold War logic predominantly from a Western perspective, but on a much more human common denominator: the obvious similarities between parallel lifestyles, in this case a shared attraction to the grotesque. 

Among the photographers featured in GROTESK are Hungarian, Slovak, Polish, and Czech artists, as well as Ukrainian and Romanian photographers. Most of the works are by contemporary artists from the period following the collapse of the Soviet Union, but there are also a few earlier photographs, such as those from Sándor Kardos’s Horus Archives. Eastern European conceptual art and pop art are represented by the works of Hungarian artists Zsuzsi Ujj and László Török, as well as Polish artist Natalia LL’s work Consumer Art (1971) and Czech artist Iren Stehli’s highly informative photo series depicting Prague shop windows from 1978. All these establish the cultural-historical precedents and context of the contemporary photographs, while also introducing themes that focus more on everyday life in this turbulent historical and social environment. 

The GROTESK project was first presented at the Fotofestiwal in Łódź, Poland (June 12–22, 2025), and then in Hungary at the Arcus Temporum art festival in Pannonhalma (August 20–24, 2025), which was also reported on by telex.hu. It is currently on display in Prague as part of the Fotograf Zone Festival between October 3 and 12, 2025, and will next be shown at the OFF Bratislava photo and new media festival in Bratislava between November 7 and 21, 2025. I definitely recommend it to those who are not satisfied with the memes circulating on social media – such as Squatting Slavs in Tracksuits, Scenic Depictions of Slavic Life, or Babushka – and who would like to explore the everyday and deeper layers of Eastern European identity through contemporary photography art. 

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Artists featured in the publication: 

Hungary: Csilla Klenyánszki, Horus Archives (Sándor Kardos), Éva Szombat, László Török, Zsuzsi Ujj; 

Czech Republic: Oskar Helcel, Dita Pepe, Iren Stehli; 

Slovakia: Andrej Balco, Martin Kollár, Zuzana Pustaiová, Viktor Šelesták; 

Poland: Zbigniew Libera, Natalia LL, Rafał Milach, Agnieszka Sejud; 

Romania: Mihai Barabancea, Tamás Hajdu; 

Ukraine: Alexander Chekmenev, Boris Mikhailov

Concept: István Virágvölgyi, Capa Center (Budapest, Hungary)

Curators: Sára Jeleňová, OFF Bratislava (Bratislava, Slovakia), Světlana Malina, Fotograf Zone (Prague, Czech Republic); Marta Szymańska, Fotofestiwal (Łódź, Poland)

Cover image: The GROTESK zine. (Photo courtesy of István Virágvölgyi.)