We warmly invite you to a reading as part of the Czech-German Cultural Days.

Accompanying the exhibition:

Eliška Bartek
And a Whole Life Ahead of Me
Cliché Verre and Photograms

31 October – 5 December 2026

READING as part of the TDKT: 1 November, 4.00 pm

Eliška Bartek reads from her autofictional novel ‘And a whole life ahead of me.’ The subsequent discussion about her life as an artist and her photographic work will be led by Kristin Dittrich, founder of the Shift School for Photography in Dresden and Vienna, and Annette Nickel from Fotoforum Dresden.

Kristin Dittrich engages intensively with biographies within a photographic and artistic context. How closely are one’s life journey and artistic work intertwined? How does one become the artist one is? And how long does this process take? Is the path a straight one, or does it consist rather of a series of detours?

Annette Nickel met Eliška Bartek in 2014, when the latter was leading a course at the summer academy of the riesa efau. Kultur Forum Dresden e. V., and became familiar with her photographic and artistic work at that time.

Photograms – Light, Material and Time
As poetic traces of light, material and time, they are created directly on the image carrier without the use of a camera. They combine experimental abstraction with a distinct physical presence and allow photography to be experienced as an immediate process of visualisation. Some works are stylistically linked to the historical photograms of the Czech avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s.

Cliché verre – between photography and drawing
As a painter, Eliška Bartek utilises the possibilities of this light drawing in a decidedly painterly manner. Her photographic images appear like black-and-white negatives of paintings, whose colours elude the eye in a mysterious way.

A life between art and literature
Alongside her work in photography and painting, Eliška Bartek is also active as a writer. In March 2024, her debut novel *Und vor mir ein ganzes Leben* was published by Weissbooks Verlag. In it, she tells an extraordinary life story.
Just how much of it actually stems from her own life and where the fiction begins is what we will explore at the Photography Salon with a reading as part of the Czech-German Cultural Days.

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Eliška Bartek, photographer, painter and author, was born in Nový Jičín in 1950 and grew up in Prague. She is regarded as one of the most significant Czech female artists of her generation. Following her successful escape to the West in 1972 under dramatic circumstances, she acquired Swiss citizenship in 1975. Since 1997, Eliška Bartek has lived and worked in Ticino and Berlin. In her art, she combines personal memories with poetic visual worlds and reflects on questions of identity, origin and transience.