from the archives

Excerpt from OSMOS Issue 12

MARIE TOMANOVA

Live for The Weather

By: Ksenia Nouril

Marie Tomanova’s multi-media works explore gender, sexuality, and identity through youth culture in the post-communist, global age. Her series Live for the Weather (2017) embodies the carefree spirit of youth in the face of an uncertain future. In forty-eight, low-resolution, NSFW snapshots that can be hung or projected on a wall, Tomanova haphazardly captures with a camera phone her everyday life in her hometown, Mikulov, in the South Moravian region of the Czech Republic near the Austrian border. As the legend goes, Tomanova purchased the phone in 2006 with money she earned through an arranged marriage and took photographs with it through 2010. While outmoded by today’s technology, this now primitive tool empowered the artist, allowing her to take charge of her body and its image.

In Live for the Weather, Tomanova confidently performs for the camera in various states of undress. Her lovers, friends, and family members mingle in this asynchronous narrative punctuated by the occasional found object, stray dog, and bucolic landscape. It would be reductive to categorize this spectacle of blatant debauchery as a mere embrace of the increasingly popular aesthetic of post- communist chic, branded by subculture icons like Russian fashion designer Gosha Rubchinskiy. Tomanova’s photographs proposition even the most prudish and puritanical viewer with an intimate invitation to a passionate picture of youth in the former Eastern Bloc.

Marie Tomanova (b. 1984) is a Czechoslovak-born, New York-based artist, working primarily in photography, performance, and film. In 2010, she received her MFA in painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Technology in Brno, Czech Republic. She also is a curator, recently mounting two exhibitions—Youth Explosion: The New Bohemia (2016) and Baby, I Like It Raw: Post-Eastern Bloc Photography and Video (2017) at the Czech Center New York. Currently, Tomanova is collaborating with artist Mirenka Cechová on a multi-media performance project entitled Miss Amerika, which was launched at TEDxPragueWomen in 2016 and will premiere along with an exhibition and publication in Prague in Spring 2018.