Of all the brilliant books that have come to pass in 2024, I want to highlight T-Club by Libuše Jarcovjáková, an artist finally getting some due over the past years. I briefly met Libuše this past week in Paris and was taken with her. I gather a sense of a great understanding of the human condition at the margins and a mirth-like state of an inherent being, with authority and absurdity in her arsenal of tools to combat the bullshit of the world. The book was developed with a cadre of extraordinary individuals, including designer Ania Nałęcka-Milach and editor and collaborator Lucie Černá. Texts by Karol Radziszewski and Christiane Brenner accompany the book. I am singling the book out as it is an essential contribution to a great artist, and I must admit the design is grand and eye-catching and highlights the work’s intentions playfully.

I previously had the privilege of pouring over her last book, Evokativ (2019), and I remember being taken by the book’s mood. It is a grainy foray into Jarcovjáková’s archive of images from the 70s through 1989 Prague. Accompanying this experience, I was given the artist’s background and let in on her status as an LGBT icon. This was quickly denuded in an interview with the artist I read in which, acknowledging that pivotal iconography, she explained that her work had more to do, like Nan Goldin, with her recording her life and her friends, more than an outright statement of activism from communist Prague. Though she admits the importance of this, I felt she was asking to be seen less for her lifestyle proclivities than for her artwork.

Notwithstanding the importance of activism, particularly under duress such as the Soviet occupation of Prague in the 1980s, what caught me slightly off guard was how fucking refreshing it was to hear someone desire to be identified as a person, not an acronym or a set of tribal values. This statement might chafe a bit, but in the end, I believe all people want an equality of being, not a set of terms that marginalizes them from the complete human experience as being read as “excepted.” There is a difference between acceptance and except-ance and I think drawing out those conclusions as a progressive movement toward equality is essential. Of course, not everyone sees it that way, and the LGBT community has long suffered (and still does) injustice, discrimination, and othering, especially in the former Soviet territories. So the fight must go on, but perhaps seeing work like Libuše’s under a wider lens of being human is not so terrible, either, and it may even move the needle forward in its way.

My take on the book itself, outside of its design and Libuše’s rising star, is that it reflects a particular time in one specific place where friends, lovers, and perhaps even short-term enemies gathered to drink, tell stories, couple, and feel safe. That Libuše recorded it all seems like a side note, where the camera is less acknowledged as a tool of performance than a tool of legacy. Though people do pose and frolic in front of the camera, Libuše is an insider, and the images that permeate the book almost seem shot from impossible corners with little notice as to their making, signaling a safe collaboration. As in Evokativ, the photos are grainy and low-lit. They exemplify a personal space and show a good amount of merry-making, suggesting a cheerful and romantic environment that seems to have been swallowed up with the 80s Bohemian life itself. The profound melancholic yet danceable music has also withered. Roses.

The book is a reflection of great times had by an artist whose desire to capture her world and life now seems essential, more extensive than her ambition to document her friends and, with that, the importance (with her earnestness in mind) of suggesting a form of resistance to the outside world, its pressures and follies of kindness. This is one of my favorite books of the year. There is a recent film on Libuše, and her work was showcased by Jim Jarmusch this year at Parisphoto as being vital. She has an exhibition opening in Prague in December, and the second edition of this book will be available imminently. Please pick this up. The design alone is worth the effort, and whether you want it to be about identity or not, it is universal enough to hold greater conversations within the pages. Highest Recommendation to it and all involved!

T-Club

Libuše Jarcovjáková

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Original Press Release

The book T-Club by Libuše Jarcovjáková shows photographs taken between 1983-85 in the legendary LGBTQ bar in Prague.

The photos were taken between 1983-85 during the totalitarianism of former Czechoslovakia. But what we see is a joyful time spent in the club where people went to seek for freedom without fear and borders, where they released their passion and joy for life.

Photographer Libuše Jarcovjáková was a regular guest there. She was part of the family. T-Club was a place where you could meet people of all ages. Beautiful young men and attractive young women. Effeminate “B’s” and decent-looking gentlemen who jumped away from their families for a while. Female footballers, drugstore assistants, postmen or train conductors, waiters, taxi drivers, and, for sure, the secret police, too.

The book is the first comprehensive photographic publication mapping this inner universe of the famous bar.

Photos © Libuše Jarcovjáková

Photo Edit & Sequencing: Lucie Černá and Ania Nałęcka-Milach

165 x 200 mm

256 pages

Open spine.

The loose dust jacket is made of transparent plastic with a silk screen.