Catharsis by Linda Zhengová

About the book:

Following her academic research, The Ambiguity of Visual Representations of Trauma, Zhengová now brings to the forefront a visual analysis in the form of a photobook - Catharsis. Concerned with the question: “how can one represent something visually that is by its very essence unrepresentable without banalizing it, trivializing it, spectacularizing it, and finally repressing it for a second time?”, she presents both archival and newly created imagery to address such problematics.

Catharsis prioritizes a lived experience and explores traumatic memory not from the perspective of moral and medical classifications but instead, as an open artistic inquiry. As such, this publication is concerned with the connections between photography and trauma, between unutterable shock and the most elevated or supreme form of human communication and representation, between traumatic non-experience and aesthetic experience.

About the artist:

Linda Zhengová is a Czech photographer and writer currently based in the Netherlands. In 2019, she

graduated with MA in Media Studies (specialization in Film and Photographic Studies) at Leiden University with distinction (cum laude). Recently, she finished her Photography BA at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. Zhengová uses the medium of photography to challenge the existing boundaries and taboos surrounding the themes of gender, sexuality, and trauma.

She has been selected as a GUP New 2021 and Fresh Eyes 2020 talent. Her previous collaborative publication with Alex Blanco (Nothing will be the Same) was nominated for the Zilveren Camera Storytelling Prize.