Lenka Glisníková (born 1990) is an artist based in Prague. An alumna of Faculty of Arts in Ostrava and the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague, Glisníková’s practice moves between photography and intermedia. Her work inquires into the material and visual qualities of the photographic medium.

Lenka Glisníková is the laureate of the 2023 Jindřich Chalupecký Award. In 2024 she took part in a residency program - Residency Unlimited in New York. Her work has been part of the House Party! (2024) exhibition at the SIC in Helsinki and Ostrava: Repeated Survey (2024) in GHMP or Group Therapy, Collections in Dialogue (2024) also in GHMP or The Landscape of Absence (2025) in Meetfactory. Recent solo exhibitions include: Sunken Streams (2025); Moment of Seclusion Over the Horizon (2023), and more. Glisníková is also the co-founder of SHOTBY.US studio, the winner of Czech Grand Design award in 2020 and 2023 within the Photography category.

AMBER HANSON: Photography in your practice often escapes the frame. When did the flat image begin to feel insufficient for what you wanted to say?

LENKA GLISNIKOVA: I was both triggered and bored by the flatness - and the box where contemporary photography seemed to be trapped in. The first step was to go from a two-dimensional rectangle to a cutout done by a laser machine. At the same moment I was watching and trying to understand the shift: how is the majority of the images that surround us produced? Images in public space, citylights, etc. It is not done in a “dark room”. It’s an industrial process taking place in factories with big printing machines that offer new possibilities in terms of print size. And then I went from flat cutout to stretching photography over the object - real spatial forms. A new entity - something between photography and object was born. It just blew my mind! And from that moment I started exploring the boundaries between digital images and physical objects, playing with scale in a physical space. In that friction between layers, materialities, and temporality, the digital image becomes a thing with weight, texture, and presence. Dragging the image back into material form so it can’t just be scrolled.

AH: In a time when most images are consumed through feeds, how do you think about slowness, attention or resistance in relation to photographic form?

LG: The physical body is still a key figure in this theatre. It gives commands through mechanical movements and produces immaterial work (my digital collages), which I later materialize and enlarge. That’s why I believe it is important to experience my exhibitions in person: to walk around, to look from a distance, to come very close, to measure scale against your own body. The composition keeps changing as you move. The objects preserve a sense of movement, which comes alive in contact with the viewer – depending on how and from where they are observed. Each person has a different angle, a different perspective. The works are full of details that cannot be perceived on a phone screen. In the physical encounter, I think something essential can happen – but the paradox is that, of course, more people will see my work on a cold screen than in real life. The glass of our phones is not a window; it’s a wall.

AH: Your work seems to treat photography less as a document and more as a site of interference. Is this still photography, or something that comes after?

LG: Even if I melted it down to the last drop of plastic, there would still be a connection to photography. I see it in the field of extended perception: it is not only an image, but it can also become an object, an installation, or a material. The medium remains alive and open to transformation. I am exploring how photography can be fragmented (You Could Feel the Friendly Stranger), cracked across the surface of an object (Moment of Seclusion Over the Horizon), or allowed to shine through – appearing and disappearing again to deny its materiality. How many times can I flatten it and then make it three-dimensional again? How many times can it be recycled and remade?

*Moment of Seclusion Over the Horizon; Kostka Gallery, Meetfactory, 2024, curator: Ján Gajdůšek. Photo courtesy: artist.*

*Moment of Seclusion Over the Horizon; Kostka Gallery, Meetfactory, 2024, curator: Ján Gajdůšek. Photo by Jan Kolsky, courtesy: artist.*

AH: Your work seems to trace the fallout of technological acceleration, not only in systems but in the collective psyche of the audience of your work. What kinds of breakdown or adaptation interest you most?

LG: The passing of time relentlessly moves forward despite our best efforts. The inevitability of change collides with the desire to preserve the motif of frozen time versus fluidity, which mirrors the tension between permanence and transformation.

The idea of ‘breakdown / adaptation’ introduces a new physical dimension in my work: moments where technologies slip out of their intended functions and become strange relics of themselves. Cables, devices, or fragments of discarded electronics often turn into fossils of past systems, carrying traces of both memory and loss. My “time capsules” (Moment of Seclusion Over the Horizon) record not only what we made, but also what we forgot or abandoned. When I embed such found objects into my work – decontextualized, transformed, hybridized – I am exploring how our material world adapts (or fails to adapt), how its language slips from the familiar into the uncanny, what is lost, and what might emerge.

*You Could Feel the Friendly Stranger; The Jindřich Chalupecký Award 2023; Plato Gallery, curators: Karina Kottová and Jakub Adamec. Photo by Jan Kolsky, image courtesy artist.*

I’m more interested in subtle breakdowns than in spectacular collapse, because breakdown doesn’t always announce itself as catastrophe. It often comes quietly, almost unnoticed. We find ourselves trapped in that moment, unable to perceive the radical transformations of the world and reality. I’m drawn to how our own perception adapts under acceleration – through disorientation, the compression of time, and the blurring of boundaries.

While preparing for my last show Sunken Streams, I was reading Ballard’s short story News from the Sun, where a disease spreads across the Earth. The protagonists fall into amnesia, each day sinking into it for a few minutes longer. They count the hours of “lost time” until, by the end, they spend almost the entire day in an unconscious, shut-down state. By the end of the story they get to experience only a few minutes of wakefulness a day, which ultimately feel alien
and unreal. I am fascinated by this motif of subjectivity in the perception of reality - its reversals - and its deep entanglement with time. What strikes me is that, rather than relying on a sci-fi environment, Ballard shows how the most radical estrangements unfold in the very fabric of everyday perception.

My interest is driven by the awareness of how little, compared to other entities, has been allotted to us as humans on this planet. And despite our attempts to slow down the aging of our bodies or to preserve the present moment, we continue, as a species, to destroy our environment and push ourselves toward extinction.

*Sunken Streams; Galerie NoD, 2025, curator: Pavel Kubesa. Courtesy of the artist.*

AH: Do you see your installations as soft diagrams of how systems of infrastructure, biology or code arrange us?

LG: There are always systems of infrastructure in my installations, merging together and supporting one another. The connections are fragile and wobbling. They can evoke the idea of different existing systems – the plumbing system, the circulatory system in the body, nesting systems, water systems, neural connections, plant networks or even energy distribution. Despite its large size, the artwork remains lightweight, caught in a phase of levitation.

AH: You have spoken of raw materials, but your materials are not just substances. They are speeds, distractions, fragments. What does it mean to work with rawness in an age of automation?

LG: I feel that the process is an important part of my work – it leaves traces. In contrast to the polished and optimized automation, rawness, both in approach and in result, opens a space where vulnerability and imperfection can still be seen and felt. Even digital images could be raw… I could distort the pixel, copy it or remix it. It mutates endlessly.

I also like to collaborate with these ‘machines of automation’ and to go against what they are standardized for. For example I stuffed a dirty modeled clay sculpture into a machine designed to churn out identical-looking ergonomic plastic packaging. I borrow the logic of industrial repetition, but I re-make it by hand, with all the irregularities and imperfections that come with it.

AH: Social media operates through repetition, urgency and gloss. Do you treat those aesthetic logics as something to imitate, infect or refuse?

LG: In my earlier works I used glossiness as a subversive tool to seduce, I was charmed by the inhumanly perfect surfaces and also I liked the contrast between “dirty” craftsmanship and the polished final result. Recently, the surfaces of my objects have begun to erode and decay as well. I want the viewer to feel attraction and discomfort at the same time.

AH: Can failure in photography, let's say, technical, sensory, structural be a compositional tool in your practice?

LG: Completely! Failure is unpleasant and inspiring, most interesting work is done at that moment. I am trying to use it as a way to exceed my own limits of imagination. To work beyond my expectation and listen to the process.

AH: Do you think the idea of a “photographic truth” still holds any weight? Or has the post-internet image shifted entirely toward performance and construction?

LG: Nowadays you end up doubting every kind of image. Reality became very complicated… I feel more and more like an astronaut in the black box, gaining and losing gravity at the same time, floating for two seconds like agent Dale Cooper before he is glitched out of the Black Lodge back to Earth.

AH: Many of your pieces carry a digital residue, not just in form but in feeling. How do you treat the online image as a material in its own right?

LG: I see those residues as sediment layered over time haunted by what came before as something to sculpt and transform. Each new object inherits traces of its predecessors, putting them into new skins, where past and present fold together into new temporal forms.

Lenka Glisníková

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