LOOSE ENDS

Pedagogical support: Veronika Daňhelová, Markéta Kinterová, Rudo Prekop, Nina Šperanda

LOOSE ENDS

Annual exhibition of students of the FAMU Studio of Documentary Strategies and the Studio of Imaginative Photography

Anna Dedecek

Inherited Absence / photo textile collage, installation

This project explores the dislocated memories and invisible threads that tie together family, loss, and return. My father escaped Czechoslovakia in 1983, leaving behind his home, language, and parents. For years, letters from his mother were their only form of communication. He returned only after her death, first in 1991—and again in 2024. His story was never fully passed down to me; I grew up without the language, without the history, and without a clear sense of where we came from.

Through photo-quilting, I attempt to piece together what now remains in my father’s family; memory. I work with fragments from my father’s archive—his childhood photographs, fine arts school drawings, the letters from his mother, and photos from his returns to the Czech Republic—layered with my own: plane tickets, photos of Jáchymov, childhood drawings, and personal ephemera collected during my time here. There is also a text narration drawn from his spoken memories—about what it meant to leave, and what it cost.

​​Weaving and sewing function here not just as material techniques, but as metaphors for how memory and identity form: through threads, gaps, layers, and gestures of repair. The weaving in this installation is intentionally broken and incomplete. However, the broken weaving isn’t about repairing what’s gone, but about acknowledging the spaces that don’t connect.

Maya Terkawi

reflections of the land / video installation, flipbook

This work is a continuation of my exploration of the Syrian identity growing up in the diaspora. An understanding of what is and what was.  

I observe a city that has been through many changes through the eyes of my dad. A local atmosphere that experienced bullets from every side. Corners that witnessed laughs, fears, and cries. Walls that still hold the sprays of the early revolution or its aftermath.

I see it all and more with someone who holds a deep love for a country that, for him, no other place can replace. This love I saw growing up reflects how much I care for it now. A land that has been so far from me for many years now feels like something I should finally know and be able to learn about. 

Eva Nora Soo Hyeon Nebelius

Held Apart / photographs

Held Apart is a project looking and documenting the emotional toll and isolation from being alone in a foreign country contrasted with the memories and connections to a home. Containing two parts interconnected, conjoined in the manner that all emotions get connected: One part looking at the exterior of being abroad, unable to connect. The second looking at the interior of what is remembered of the intimacy of home. Held Apart is the visual aspect of multiple months without close connection, and the silent counting of days.

Kristýna Mikulková 

The story of the dead fish / photographs, audio

The installation is inspired by the discovery of a large number of dead fish in a pond on a trip with children. From this event, other activities developed, leading us to think about how the fish could have died, to building a memorial to the fish and singing to them. Fantastic stories about wild foxes or pike biting the fish were interspersed with theories about lightning striking the surface of the water or poison or shampoo in the water. But locals tell us that this is a normal phenomenon that happens every spring. We try to count the fish, there are really about thirty of them in a short stretch, it boggles our minds. We cross the dam, where the theory of shampoo comes up, because the water foams a lot. I wonder if there might be some connection with the fertilization of the surrounding fields and the death of fish at this time. We have no choice but to investigate and eventually we learn that this is indeed a period of increased fish mortality because the fish are weakened after the winter and as the spring warms up, bacteria multiply in the water which can cause the death of weak individuals. It has been interesting for me to observe how the children find a relationship with the dead fish and the level of empathy they work with in a very short period of time.

Richard Kovalovský

Washed Out Crossings / photographs, installation

The project Washed Out Crossings is based on the historical operation “Border Stone” carried out by the Czechoslovak secret police (ŠtB), regarded as the most elaborate provocation of the secret service during the communist regime. State Security deliberately encouraged citizens to flee abroad, only to detain them at a fabricated border and charge them with attempted illegal emigration. The deception was meticulously crafted – from the fake customs office and German-speaking soldiers to the staged interrogations. The project explores how power constructs its own version of reality, and how lies can become instruments of control and repression. It traces borders that cannot be drawn on any map: moral, internal, and constantly shifting under the weight of circumstance. Its starting point is the night of the first staged crossing, which established a blueprint for the systematic abuse of trust. It is to this night that the project returns – not only thematically, but also formally. Darkness, flashes of light, mirroring, fragments of space. The silence between the forest and the border is not neutral, it is tense, like the moment just before something happens.

Trang Erika Nguyen Thu

Quiet Radiance / intervention in public space, installation with projection

Is it really grey, or do we decide on perceiving it as such?

We roam through the same places almost every day.
This repetition etches the patterns of our movements into memory, automating our actions and dulling our awareness — as if our perception “greys out” these notions. The mind begins to blur the familiar into the background.

We stop noticing.

This project seeks to disrupt that automatic gaze.
There are countless things that usually remain unnoticed. The surface we walk across daily is full of structure and rhythm, yet it goes unnoticed due to its sameness. By creating an alteration in the pavement of Malostranské náměstí, I aim to momentarily catch the eye of the passerby.
The intervention adds a new layer onto the existing one, reflecting its natural structure, yet inviting a shift in our perception — that of the everyday space of Malostranské náměstí.

Let me invite you to think about this:
We come into contact with various patterns every day — yet do we ever truly see them?
Or has their familiar rhythm, repetition, and sameness rendered them invisible?

Ana Ilienko

Inhale. Exhale. / collage, artist book

The series  Inhale. Exhale. explores a personal process of coping with inner conflict and emotional strain through physical action. The Inhale. section consists of collages made using a simple yet layered technique: the same image is repeated to create a rhythmic, meditative structure. These works resemble breath — concentrated, quiet, reassembled from fragile pieces. They offer a way to stay grounded in moments of instability.

The Exhale. section is a photo-book diary. It captures emotional states that are hard to verbalize: emptiness, vulnerability, self-hatred. It doesn’t seek to fix them, but to give them form and space. The series speaks of choice — to destroy or to create. At times, life wears us down — and so we sigh. But still, it matters to keep breathing. To take another breath.

Sára Hacherová

Borderless City / photographs, artist book

The project stems from my personal experience of constantly traveling between my hometown in Slovakia and Prague over the past eight months. This recurring movement became the most prominent memory in my mind – so much so that it transformed into a constant state, making me feel as though I was never truly present anywhere. This period for me was conditioned by remembering, which was not so much nostalgic as it was essential for a sense of security. Home was most present when I was not there.

Gradually, a new space formed within me, where these two places no longer function independently of each other, but rather seep into one another. I use photography as a tool to map this fictional territory that lacks structure, architecture, or system. It becomes a shifting wasteland in which I move

Ema Mihálová

If I wandered around the frontier in the dark, I might trip on a boundary stone and keep walking without my body a difference / video-performance, photography

I explore the subtle implications of the easiest possible migration between two countries. I place my body in the specific space of the Czech-Slovak border and attempt to observe the trans/de-formations it undergoes as it crosses a line so abstractly present in my life. The relationship towards both countries takes on new aftertastes and undertones with each crossing; new connotations accumulate on it each time, surrounded by shifting contexts. My dead skin peels aways, my perception of my own identity dissolves and reappears again. In the creation of the work I emphasize my absurdly privileged inside-Schengen position, from which the border and its politics can seem like intangible concepts with no consequences on real life. This place is, for me, a site not different from any other, in which I can move around freely and safely, in a gesture of artistic play. The frontier is not ontologically anchored, it’s selective in its danger and its impact on a person’s existence.

In the video performance I build a temporary dwelling around a boundary stone, as I resign on the accommodativeness, limited by the political climate, of both states. I cover the semantic charge of the physical manifestation of the state border with white textile. And yet, perhaps counterintuitively, I’d decided to do this here, at the threshold, embedding the piece in the non-ideal reality. Finally, I dismantle the house due to nearby thunder and the absurdity of the entire act, leaving its remains behind as a memento of a hopeless symbolic attempt at an alternative.