Zuzana Pustaiova is a Slovakian photographer and a Fine Arts Ph.D. candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava. She is also the 2nd prize winner of the 6th edition of the international photography competition Different Worlds 2018 organized by Photon Gallery. This annual competition is aimed at a younger generation of photographers (up to 35 years of age) from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). In her works, she often explores the topic of family, the intricacies of family relationships, as well as the relation to its history and origins. The current exhibition at Photon Gallery Vienna presents an expanded and much bigger version of her winning series Family Album (2013-2018) curated by Branislav Štěpánek.

Family Album

The series Family Album is based on the artist’s family archive. Pustaiová selects photographs from the archive and amends them with handcrafted artifacts of the past and the present - lace, color stickers, matches, feathers, millimeter paper- with a sense of irony. The deliberately decorative character of the interventions and the context in which they are found constructs an intelligent commentary on the gender stereotypes of the typical Central European family. Pustaiová is not the only artist working with the photographic archive, however, where others express themselves with deadly seriousness, Pustaiová’s style is easy, without the unnecessary oversimplification and the distraction of the conceptual depth of the subject matter.

Branislav Štěpánek