A Paris exhibition you won’t want to miss, featuring a photographer I adore

There are exhibitions that draw you in with their title, others that capture you with their concept, and then there are those you are drawn to because you know they will feature a name that delights you every single time. For me, that name is Hana Knížová. I first discovered her work through the project MOTHERS, which I wrote about for Vogue Adria, that gentle yet brutally honest portrait of motherhood seen through the lens of time, change, and identity.

That is why the news immediately caught my attention that her works are among the selected pieces in the new Paris exhibition dedicated to visual heritage, time, and the contemporary interpretation of classical motifs. It is a collective project bringing together fourteen artists of the new generation of the Czech photography scene and their approaches to archives, memory, and aesthetics: Marie Tomanová, Hana Knížová, Bára Prášilová, Kateřina Sýsová, Tereza Kopelentová, Vladimír Kiva Novotný, Vojtěch Veškrna, Tomáš Jiráček, Tereza Zelenková, Michaela Karásek Čejková, Eliška Sky, Vendy Mlejnská, Viktorie Macánová and Wlasta Laura Laurenčíková.

The exhibition titled Joy and Refuge opens a contemporary dialogue about the transformations of today’s society and the role photography plays within it. The works on display move between reality and dream, documentation and staging, fragility and confidence. The artists explore what it means to live in the digital age, where joy hides, and what can serve as a refuge for us, whether physical or metaphorical.

The concept of the exhibition starts from the idea that visual heritage is not preserved only in museums, but also in fragments of our everyday lives, in texture, in light, in objects that outlive their owners, in family photographs, and in the way we understand beauty.

The artists gathered around this project create a dialogue between the old and the new, between the material and the emotional. Some photographs resemble personal archives, others feel like contemporary homages to classical aesthetics, and some function as documents of a time that tries to slip away but still finds its way back. Hana Knížová appears here as an author who intuitively understands exactly what the exhibition is trying to convey, that photography can be both document and emotion, both change and continuity. Her works in the exhibition visually communicate with the other artists, yet they still carry her unmistakable signature: the ability to capture a moment that is at once intimately someone’s and universally ours. Just like in MOTHERS, Hana again poses the question of what remains of time when we try to record it and who we become when we look at it.

The exhibition runs until November 30, and if you find yourself in Paris, it is well worth one of those slow afternoons when you want to breathe in art and walk out inspired.