Alena Kotzmannová 

The photographic project of Alena Kotzmannova called Temporary Person points to the passionate interest in the research of various „suspicious phenomena“ that, without any sound reason, come to us from the future. Its photographs are neither illusion nor the result of digital manipulation. They record with sensitivity author’s search for „temporary person“, that leaves nearly imperceptible traces in our world appearing unpredictably once in the open landscape, the other time in subway or behind the shop window without paying any attention to the boarders of the states and continents. These phenomena are so gentle that it is very simple not to notice them at all. It also leads to the fact that theirs explanation is not easy and unambiguous.

Temporary Person does not ever appear in its complexity. It often changes its faces. It shows the fragments of its body, dematerializes itself in volatile shadow or lightshine, infiltrates in the every day objects and also into the waste, sometimes it even does transpersonal acrobatism entering the bodies of our relatives.

Sexuality, objectiveness and others suspicious phenomenons took in as an objects of private satisfaction and at the same time high efficient collective machines – these are the leading participants of high-tech myth, which is Kotzmannova using to change our imagination and our identity. She does not put together technology and art just to make another Utopia vision of the eden on earth. She indicates, that cybernetics systems quite embrace us and this extraordinary suspicious and aggresively attacked phenomenon at the same time does not have to mean apocalyptical end, but on the contrary it can bring sharp and new sensitivity.

Martina Pachmanova 
art critic and historian
(from the catalogue Temporary Person, Prague House of Photography, 1998)