Time, its passing, the past — these would seem the natural themes, for Táňa Kuzmová’s combined textile works all but insist we speak of them. Through period photographs they summon bygone days, absent people, and transformed places. They point, they remind, they preserve.And yet, I find myself reluctant to speak of time in its chronological sense. For in truth, Táňa is not reminiscing either. The archival fragments she uses — photographs, embroidery, snippets of chronicles, private letters — are not illustrations of a historical moment. They are a making-present of a certain quality, one you can move toward, even touch. And that is exactly what she achieves in her embroidered images: she evokes something singular so we might share in it alongside her.
A school class from 1928/29, the Šudince volunteer fire brigade, the Kuzma family, an unknown beekeeper — these and other photographic moments she transforms into events, into sharp points on the line of time, into tender nerve-centers demanding a particular sensitivity. To approach them, we must exert a certain effort. Or allow someone else to do so on our behalf. Táňa accepts this task gladly; after all, as a native of Šudince and an offshoot of the Kuzma–Hajšel family tree, she is uniquely suited to it. She embroiders, cuts, collages, stuffs… Because if the qualities within these photographs are truly to be brought into the present, they demand a physical act. A touch — sometimes even an incision. The more she works the material with her hands, the more tangible the encounter becomes.
Even her choice of base — coarse grain sacks — recalls the physicality of labor, echoing the lives of her forebears lived in the rhythms of work and sustenance. She quite literally stitches herself to them. Here, thread becomes a medium of connection, a soft synapse reaching toward the absent and toward us, the viewers. She leaves clues along the way: a stitched date, a name, a title; a chair that belonged to the household but never entered the photograph. Just as once — or perhaps not “once,” but in the timeless presence of the archetypal — another woman used a thread to guide her beloved from the labyrinth.
Through the softness of these fibers, we step into the realm of the feminine, aligning ourselves with mothers, grandmothers, and foremothers, all tending the single riverbed of blood. Blood that, symbolized by a crimson thread, stretches back to biblical Tamar, Rahab, and the Shulammite. Perhaps this is why the motif of the pomegranate recurs, split open like a fertile womb. Punica granatum: mythical source of life.
Yet in Táňa’s hands, the thread is not only a guide — it can also disorient. Across the photographs and burlap frames, it tangles into near-impenetrable webs of scratches. The image reveals and obscures at once. It draws the lines of wear that no life can escape. Figures appear scarred, marked with thick and fine wounds, or disrupted to the point of near illegibility. The labyrinth from which the thread once led us out returns here as a thicket. Perhaps another vantage is needed to discern a meaningful pattern in the chaos of lines and curves. Perhaps it is enough to shift perspective and rediscover the safety of embroidery’s orderliness, as hinted by the fragments of original stitching placed at the lower edges of her works. Or perhaps we must look from the reverse, slip back through the rupture of the pomegranate, and glimpse the perspective of nonexistence. From there, one might perceive the inevitability guiding each stitch into its precise place. From there, it would seem reckless to unpick anything from the embroidery, which now assumes an almost photographic factuality. A clumsy hand might disrupt the craftsmanship woven across generations. That is why the faces in her images remain untouched: there is always something that must remain untouchable.
The works in 780 (Returns to the Past) are images-as-evocations, images-as-encounters. Like all encounters, they transform the qualities they approach the moment contact is made. After all, this is the work of tradition: to preserve through perpetual transformation. Táňa does this not only faithfully but inventively — and her transformations are beautiful.
Slavka Liptáková