Dialogues on Art Reproductions III/IV
The Real Picture

Sami Al-Salamoni, Zbyněk Baladrán,
André Feliciano, Kvet Nguyễn

9. 9 – 22. 11. 2026
opening: 8. 9. 2026 at 6 PM
at Cursor Gallery

curator: Meghan Forbes

As I began to develop the exhibition The Real Picture in early 2025 at the start of the second term of Donald Trump’s presidency, I immediately understood the installation to be an opportunity to engage with issues that are increasingly censored at home in the United States. In the context of the larger framework of the exhibition series Dialogues on Art Reproductions, I was interested in exploring certain topics through the agitational quality of the photographic image, specifically as inherent to its objectness and perceived objectivity. The exhibition is a working-through of what the photograph can be, can say, can mean in an age of digital exploitation and manipulation, of simultaneous self-censorship and oversharing.

Against this backdrop, I have brought together with The Real Picture what might at first glance appear to be a hodgepodge of photographic (and filmic) images, from analog to digital, but all were intentionally selected within a specific rubric. That is, I sought out bodies of work that intend to either enforce or subvert our previously held understanding of the world, through the manipulation, recontextualization, and distribution of the photographic image.

The exhibition, which can be understood as having five chapters and an aside, is composed as a visual essay, which invites the viewer to make novel and even unsettling connections through a juxtaposition of images that follow certain motifs of settler-colonial violence and war on the one hand, and resistance and reclamation on the other. I also allowed myself to make it personal: I placed the role of curator alongside the creative act of art production, admitting myself to be not only an assembler and passive observer of the histories the exhibition sets out to criticize, but also—as a European-descendant US citizen—implicated in them.   

Sami Al-Salamoni’s 1973 film Cowboy is a montage of found footage from preexisting stills, films, and newsreels. Hollywood has long valorized the “Cowboy and Indian” narrative, so Al-Salamoni had a vast repository of the movie industry’s imagery to mine. He draws from classic Westerns like Two Mules for Sister Sara and True Grit, as well as the Wild West gone awry in Midnight Cowboy, to present a rather different-than-intended narrative of settler-colonialism in the United States. Hollywood has provided the source material by which to present the violent and genocidal origin story of the nation, with John Wayne as its apt front man. Al-Salamoni also draws from documentary footage and other films, including Hello, Dolly!, The Trial, The Godfather, Uptight, Vanishing Point, and The Strawberry Statement, which variously valorize and criticize American culture. In just fifteen minutes, the story progresses more or less chronologically to show the arrival of European settlers on land already inhabited; this quickly gives rise to the skyscrapers of New York, freeways of Los Angeles, and, ultimately, space exploration.

In Al-Salamoni’s film, as cowboys are montaged with images of soldiers, Nazi flags, civilian victims of the Vietnam War, displaced Palestinians living in tents, and police brutality against Black Americans, the United States’s government is implicated in all the world’s strife. At the conclusion of Cowboy, scenes from global protests give way to hills on fire—images that invite uncanny comparisons with realities from our present day, from the student-led protests demanding that universities and tax dollars stop supporting Israel’s genocide against Palestinians, to the increase in devastating wildfires ignited by climate change.

The exhibition as a whole has been organized around the motifs montaged in Al-Salamoni’s film.

As an ever-increasing inundation of images in our daily lives leads to a total excess of visual stimuli, a recent work by Zbyněk Baladrán, Thirteen Theses Against Snobs (2025), attempts to wrest the photographic image of war from the desensitization that comes with visual ubiquity by defamiliarizing found photographs, transforming them into computer-assisted hand drawings. Documentation by Palestinian photographers of the razing of neighborhoods in Gaza by Israeli bombardments have been sourced from the Associated Press and other news outlets and are accompanied by text from Walter Benjamin’s short treatise “Dreizehn Thesen wider Snobisten” [“Thirteen Theses Against Snobs”], set together in a series of black-and-white panels. Baladrán appropriates this material—Benjamin’s text of 1925 and photographs of Gaza from 2024–2025—and synthesizes it in a collage of his own making, posing the question of the place of the artist in this tableau, and the role of one who witnesses atrocities at a distance. For example, the third panel bears Benjamin’s dialectical statement, “The artwork is a masterpiece. The document serves to instruct,” underneath which a schematic line drawing of collapsed buildings is accompanied by a caption informing us that we are looking at the neighborhood of Rafah, “destroyed by sustained aerial bombardment before the Israeli army launched a ground offensive on southern Gaza on May 6, 2024. (Ali Abud Taha/TNH).” The digitally produced renderings are displayed as an artwork yet also function as an instructive (and hopefully, agitational) document. As viewers must look closely and contemplatively in order to understand what they are seeing, the work simultaneously demands attention and makes strange what is, of course, inherently absurd: the attempted annihilation of an entire civilization.

Displayed alongside Al-Salamoni’s film, a set of digital reproductions from the Czechoslovak arts and culture newspaper Literární noviny [Literary News] are projected in a loop. The selected pages, a vignette from the years 1963 to 1968, do not represent the full run of the paper in that period but, rather, are a selection that fit a rubric of my own devising (that is, images dealing with colonial occupation, war, and protest movements), and which end with the paper’s suppression coincident with the Prague Spring. The photographs were sourced from international press agencies and purposed toward expressing solidarity with various liberation struggles. A 1964 issue pictures the former Nazi engineer Wernher von Braun comfortably chatting on the phone, with his feet propped up on the table in front of him, model rockets lined up at his back. The caption informs readers that he first got his chops building rockets for Adolf Hitler before finding a new post-World War II home engineering them in Huntsville, Alabama. Another photograph, from 1965, shows a young Queen Elizabeth in Ethiopia, her face turned away from a mural proudly depicting African independence. Here, the caption, quoted and translated from its source, the magazine Paris-Match (also the source of the von Braun photo), reads, “The Queen prefers to turn her head.” In 1966, photographs depicting military violence in Vietnam notably increase in frequency in Literární noviny. By 1968, depictions of protests against the Vietnam War are joined by reportage on protests at home, building up to the Prague Spring. At that point, Literární noviny became Kulturní noviny [Cultural News] for a few issues, before going silent (until being relaunched in 1990).

On a series of tables of printed matter, two issues of Revolver Revue from 1992—by then no longer the DIY samizdat periodical of its 1980s origins in Czechoslovakia but something inching closer to a glossy arts and lit mag—provide an interesting take on US social and cultural life as seen from Prague in the post-1989 era. One issue provides a report from Los Angeles following the uprising that stemmed from the acquittal of police officers who had been recorded on camera brutally assaulting Rodney King during a routine traffic stop. Prior to that issue, another features a translation of Susan Sontag’s infamous 1975 text “Fascinating Fascism” [“Fascinujici fašismus”], in which Sontag is ostensibly chiding an intellectual elite for rehabilitating Leni Riefenstahl on aesthetic grounds while she also awkwardly concedes the “sexual allure of fascism.” When it was first published by The New York Review of Books, Sontag’s essay did not include the photo-documentation that supplements the Czech-language version. In the latter, Sontag’s argument is illustrated with fascist film propaganda from Riefenstahl’s time, as well as film stills of nude white women dancing from Wilhelm Prager’s 1925 Ways to Strength and Beauty [Wege zu Kraft und Schönheit].   

The selection of images accompanying Sontag’s article in Revolver Revue suggests how the popular Körperkultur of the early twentieth century, adopted by schools of interwar modernist dance in Europe, was also a harbinger of the aesthetic of a white Supremacist ideal that took hold under fascism. Tanečnice ve fotografii [Dancers in Photography], published in Prague in 1944, seems to make this connection explicit, as we see former stars of the avant-garde stage, such as Milča Mayerová, leaping amongst fields and forests in a way that portends a fascist aesthetic.

One successful Czech dancer of the interwar period who does not feature in Tanečnice ve fotografii is Míra Holzbachová, who had been a peer of Mayerová on the stage of the Osvobozené divadlo [Liberated Theater] in Prague in the 1920s. That is likely because in 1944 she was living in the United States, her exile necessitated by her public anti-fascist position. Holzbachová was also a strong critic of the capitalism and colonialism she observed in the US, and she returned directly to Prague at the end of World War II. In 1963, she published Amerika země Indiánů [America, Land of the Indians], framing her wartime experience abroad as a citizen of an occupied nation, forced to live in exile on likewise-unceded land, and she also gave a series of lectures on the topic. Holzbachová reproduced images in her book from US sources that are nevertheless embedded in the colonial framework she writes against, such as photographs from old issues of National Geographic and color reproductions of the artist Winold Reiss’s painted portraits of members of the Blackfeet Nation, which had been commissioned by the Great Northern Railway beginning in 1928. A different portrait appears on the cover of each new edition of Holzbachová’s book, which was last reissued in paperback in 1980, and was published in Slovak translation in 1978.

The representation of the Blackfeet community is an oblique, but not the only, connection between Holzbachová and the dancer Rosalie Jones, born in western Montana on the Blackfeet Reservation during World War II in 1941 and pictured dancing on the page of the 1980 publication The Song Remembers, which presented the work of contemporary Indigenous artists across the United States working in various mediums. Both dancers also incorporated modernist concepts of pantomime into their work: in the case of Holzbachová to advance the communist cause and reject the rise of fascism; for Jones, to incorporate Indigenous motifs into American modern dance while resisting the erasure of native people and the collective memory of their ways of life prior to forced displacement and the system of government boarding schools.

A family photo album within this display marks an unusual curatorial choice and a direct confrontation with my own embeddedness in this history, as it contains pictures from a holiday in Yosemite National Park—a site of violent displacement that subsequently has made a tourist attraction out of traces of the Indigenous people now displaced. I recently found my younger self inside this album, posing for the camera: a girl with long blonde hair in a dress my mother made, smiling placidly with an arm around my little brother’s shoulder, at the so-called Ahwahnee Hotel, celebrating Thanksgiving, of all things, in 1991—also the year of Rodney King’s police beating in my hometown. These family photographs, long latent in the childhood bedroom and activated all these years later by reopening the photo album, are a record of my own lived reality and complicity in the things I write against.

The artistic practice of Kvet Nguyễn relies on both personal and public archives in order to document the presence of the Vietnamese community in Czechoslovakia—now Slovakia—which is largely left out of mainstream representations of the nation and the people who comprise it. Nguyễn’s work does not rely solely on publicly sourced materials but also incorporates those generated within the Vietnamese community living in Czechoslovakia (now Czechia and Slovakia), including personal archives of photographs from her own family and others, portraits first captured on film, now digitized for dispersal and occasionally altered. The site-specific installation Leftover Bodies (2024) draws from long-term research with digital archives of newspapers and periodicals from Slovak-language media in the 1990s. Nguyễn intersperses these textual reports, overtly racist in nature, with intimate photographic portraits of Vietnamese living in Slovakia. With each new installation of the work, the artist works closely with the images, as she affixes the digital prints on translucent paper directly onto the wall, then adds layers of wall paint over the edges, so that the subject is individually framed and stands out from the background, which fades into the support behind it. Archive of Returns (2021) is an intimate, personal reflection on diaspora through the photographic object—that is, as rooted in the process of making these photos, collecting them, preserving and arranging them in a wooden case, and, finally, inviting the gaze of the potentially unknown viewer, who may lift the photos, encased in glass, from their individual slots, and potentially rearrange them. Nguyễn’s work traces the physical and philosophical effects of diaspora, and the archive of the photographs that appear across Nguyễn’s work becomes a record of places where people are and are no longer. As a whole, they both lay bare, and invite the viewer to bear witness to, a history that is at once very personal and absolutely intrinsic to the period of state socialism in Czechoslovakia.

An Aside (outside)

The Brazilian artist André Feliciano’s Camera Flowers, in which fake potted plants bloom photo apparatuses that look back at the viewer (albeit artificially, as the cameras are mere molds, not real recording devices), are poetically playful in conceit but also unsettling in their persistent reminder that we are always being watched. While we are busy documenting funny fake flowers, or every insignificant move we make, just as we also make videos of protests and the latest plume of smoke, we’re both capturing and being captured, so that any real attempt at liberation becomes a false potentiality. In their imaginary and actually image-less world, the camera flowers offer a flight of fancy: as Feliciano intends, when we stand before the flowers, we do not need to pose, for there is no image generated. That is, we can do whatever we wish, without capture.

Living as we actually do under the eye of so many real lenses, however, we are, in a sense, trapped by the images we make within a capitalist society of consumption. We live inside the image and are controlled by it.

What can we do with photographs today, and what can they do to us?

The third exhibition in the cycle Dialogues on Art Reproductions is prepared by the writer and curator Meghan Forbes in collaboration with art historian Hana Buddeus, visual artist Zbyněk Baladrán, and graphic designer Adéla Svobodová.

Selected reproductions come from the Digital periodical archive, operated by the research infrastructure of the Czech literary bibliography of the Institute of Czech Literature of the CAS (ORJ code: 90243).

This exhibition is part of the Prague Art Week 2026 and Parallel Program of Fotograf Zone festival 2026.

The program of the Cursor Gallery is possible through kind support of Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, Prague City Council, State Fund of Culture of the Czech Republic, City District Prague 7, GESTOR – The Union for the Protection of Authorship
Partners: Art Hotel Praha
Acknowledgement: Institute for Czech Literature of the CAS, Krajská galerie výtvarného umění ve Zlíně
Media partners: ArtMap, jlbjlt.net