Zora’s Twilight

Veronika Čechmánková (CZ), Darja Lukjanenko (UA)

Sofie Tobiášová (CZ), Laze Tripkov (MK)

25/4 – 25/5 2025

Curators: Viktor Čech & Lenka Sýkorová (CZ)

Opening Friday 25 of April  17:00 – 21:00

Performance by Darja Lukjanenko 17:30

Performance by Laze Tripkov 18:00

The moment of dusk arrives, our daily worries recede with the sun of day and are replaced by the dim twilight of our dreams and desires. Zora of twilight, or also in Czech Večernice, was in Old Slavic mythology the personification of twilight, the departure of the sun beyond the horizon. But perhaps she was also the one who, with her merciful darkness, covered the evils and cruelties of the world and established a reign of intimate darkness and rest.
Most of us are probably aware that in the cruel storms of the contemporary world, any meaningful art cannot be a mere escape into the dark platonic cave of our projected desires. Even so, that suggestive sensuous power of moments connected with moments of emergence and dissolution, dawn and dusk, as once fascinated the Romantic visionaries, is something that can give us strength and teach us the way to new and better ways.

The symbolic perception of the world around us, as was customary with our ancestors, can be as much the consolation of our souls today as its damnation. It does not matter whether we claim to be daughters or sons of light or darkness, but rather how we can find our way to the right signifier in the signified.

But we should not fall into the terrifying black light of the traps and falsehoods of the Dark Enlightenment, which seeks behind the tradition of the past and its faded shadows a dangerous instrument of power, but instead we should look to the historical memory of symbolism and imagination as possible inspirations for deepening current social empathy and sharing.

In the days before the advent of electric lighting and the ubiquitous invasion of evening illumination into all corners, banishing every ghost or obscurity, ‘dusking’ was a common practice in many countries and households. The quiet passive watching of the fading of light and colour, coupled with the plunging of the surrounding environment into ever darker shadows, was a kind of quiet meditation on a very slow process composed of many fragments of timelessness. Where the day was defined by a sharp gaze, spatial relationships and the clear position of human bodies and surrounding objects within its fixed boundaries, a twilight gradually set in in which the understanding of place and object relations became increasingly indeterminate and open to our imagination. The twilight-watching family intimately shared the uniqueness of their unity. The lonely viewer then lost the anxiety and fear of the solitary figure and became an overlap between himself and the surrounding environment or nature.

As in the work of the artists in this exhibition, human experience has become primarily a space between us, in which loneliness and the understanding of darkness as loss and negation are replaced by sharing and a sense of unity.

Veronika Čechmánková (*1996) is a photographer and intermedia artist. She focuses mainly on the transformation of symbols and traditions in time and their new meanings for the present. In addition to photography and video, her frequent means of expression are installations made of ephemeral materials such as dough as well as ceramics.She graduated from the studio of photography and new media at FAMU, Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. Since 2024, together with Nikola Ivanov, she has been leading the Applied Photography Studio at the Faculty of Applied Photography at the Academy of Performing Arts in Ústí nad Labem, CZ.

Darja Lukjanenko (*1994) works as an interdisciplinary artist. It moves across performance, text and mixed media. Her creative process is based on the practices of stimulating empathy, studying the position of non-humanism and discovering forms of relationships without domination. From 2022, she maps the processes of decolonization of Ukrainian culture and archives the Russian war in Ukrainian mythology. Currently, she is a PhD candidate at the FAD UJEP in Ústí nad Labem Czech Republic.

Sofie Tobiášová (*1996) graduated from the painting studio of AAAD in Prague and then studied painting at Die Angewandte in Vienna. She works alternately in the Czech Republic and Italy. She is a painter whose imagination revolves around mythological reflections of her own melancholy, subtle shadows and corners of our private realities. The figurative language of her paintings is a constant play between the naivety of our subjective perspective and the reflections of the more general archetypes of our life in the world in which we live. She is currently represented by the UNA gallery in Piacenza and Milano, Italy.

Laze Tripkov (*1978) is a distinguished graphic designer, educator, and interdisciplinary researcher in art and design. He currently serves as a professor of Visual Communication and Graphic Design at the FAD IBU in Skopje, Macedonia. His academic and professional interests encompass a wide range of creative digital disciplines, including virtual reality (VR) immersions, media art, interactive installations, and the exploration of emerging technologies in research and education. Currently, he is a PhD candidate at the FAD UJEP in Ústí nad Labem Czech Republic.

The exhibition Zora’s Twilight is produced with Galleri CC, and supported by Faculty of Art and Design at Jan Evangelista Purkyně University in Ústí nad Labem, Malmö Stad and the Kulturrådet.

Opening hours:
Thursday-Friday: 15.00-18.00
Saturday-Sunday: 12.00-16.00