CGD

The work ethic of photographer Tereza Mundilová cannot be separated from the inner intensity of her pieces. Marina Abramović put it well in an interview for the prestigious London-based Re-edition magazine for which Mundilová took a few of her portraits. When asked whether her feverish tendency to work has something to do with a Slavic work ethic, Abramović replied: “Not at all. My brother, for example, he wrote above his bed: ‘If I feel like working, I lie down. Then the feeling goes away.’ I’m not like that. I’m busy. I love to work. To work, to work, to work.”

This answer also reflects Mundilová’s intense relationship to her own work, which impacts not only her creative method but has also often determined her place of residence, obvious from the list of major cities she has lived and worked in – Vienna, Berlin, New York, Munich, Paris… And she has drawn unique inspiration from each of them. For example, for Die Zeit magazine she created a series of provocative portraits of Anne Imhof, one of the most interesting persons working in contemporary art, which were exhibited on a Parisian roof. The portraits of Marina Abramović rather draw on Slavic folklore. As she herself explains, “These are intimate moments with dramatic, almost ritualized scenes; we find here an homage to Balkan erotica but they also provide reflection of Abramović’s interest in physical pain, fear and her courage to expose herself to uncomfortable situations.” Apart from editorial work, Mundilová has also been successful in the commercial context: for example, in her campaigns for Striplin, Puma Mostro and Adidas Superstar where she systematically exercised the same degree of authorial control and artistic radicality.

Monika Čejková

Her photographs are like playlists on Spotify. First Olivia Rodrigo, then Snow Strippers, then Sega Bodega. These are also the artists she listens to, most likely in that order. Tereza Mundilová doesn’t mind the commercial pop nor the club underground. She uses both in her images, and both are equally worthy of respect for her. In a poptimist sense, she is honestly interested in how these two worlds interact with one another. What they share, what they steal from each other.

“I listen to music 24/7. I grew up with MTV, Tumblr and MySpace. These were the places where creative people from around the world met. We created sort of the first, great on-line archive of our feelings and our tastes,” describes Mundilová the first impulses which formed her aesthetic tastes. She was born in Vienna with Czech ancestry, and now lives between Paris and Berlin, and although the first artistic steps of her teenage years led to her playing with an emo band, it was visuality, photography and directing music videos which finally won out.

“A portrait is a manifestation of the moment of encounter between two people. It’s them and me. I show those aspects of them which I am able to understand and identify with,” she says about the photographs of celebrities, as well as her hard-to-sort solitaires made on commission: sometimes for the German weekly Die Zeit, sometimes for the 032c fashion magazine (published every six months). Much like with her musical tastes, Mundilová feels most at home in fragile, tectonically volatile terrain where pop culture clashes and melds with avant-garde tendencies.

Mundilová’s main influences come from music and from things which are seemingly unrepresentable in visual terms. But if there is one thing we can say about her photographs, it is that their volume is turned all the way up. It seems the people in her images will burst through at any moment. They attack the space before the image, as if the margins and frame couldn’t contain them. They expand like sound. For Mundilová, each photograph is an amp turned to the max.

Pavel Turek