Marie Tomanova Lili, 2016

Czech-born Marie Tomanova grew up in a South Moravian border town, Mikulov. After receiving a painting MFA she left to United States. Turning to photography displacement, identity, gender, and memory became key themes in her work.

Tomanova has had solo shows worldwide including in New York City, Prague, Tokyo, and Paris; her work has been exhibited in Berlin for the European Month of Photography 2020 Biennial, and at the Rencontres d’Arles as part of the Louis Roederer Discovery Award 2021 (Arles, France). At Rencontres d’Arles it was selected to travel to the Jimei x Arles International Photo Festival in Xiamen, China in 2021.

Tomanova is currently preparing several upcoming exhibitions to coincide with the 2024 release of a feature length HBO documentary on her trajectory as an artist, World Between Us.

Tomanova's first book Young American (Paradigm Publishing, 2019) focuses on individuality, identity, and belonging in the American social landscape. It features a foreword by acclaimed photographer Ryan McGinley and sold out shortly after its publication. Deftly entwining portraiture and landscape to recontextualize and expand the meaning of each, Tomanova published, with art historian Thomas Beachdel, her second book New York New York (Hatje Cantz, 2021) with foreword by Kim Gordon. Her third book It Was Once My Universe, with foreword by Lucy Sante, was recently published by SuperLabo, Japan in fall 2022. It is a deeply personal project about her return home to the Czech Republic after 8 years in exile as an immigrant living in the United States.

Tomanova’s work is featured in A PROFECÍA. Curated by Filipka Rutkowska as a continuation of Casa Filipka – an ongoing project organized together with Her Clique – A PROFECÍA is centered on an envisioned future through the female gaze; one that enables a more empowered, speculative relation to both time and space, plant, landscape, and animal; one that breaks the brutality of dualistic thinking and binary structures and replaces them with a spectrum, acknowledging and honoring the and rather than the or. Following principles of transfuturism, and emerging from histories like that of Casa Susanna, this exhibition is a frame for repositioning one's own body as the intermediary for a more intuitive knowledge; a knowledge that doesn’t make assumptions but rather listens, looks, smells, tastes, hears, feels, orients, and balances. A knowledge that doesn’t require eyes for seeing but presupposes sentience, non-human intelligence, time, cycles, and the fluidity of being (in its broadest possible definition), and exists within a continuum of experiences and knowledge, through-out (non-linear) time. And as this knowledge becomes accumulated and disseminated, and as personal mythologies merge with predominant norms, feminist histories, ecologies and states of being, through rose-tinged utopian lenses we divine a centered space that is Other – healing, forgiving, holistic, transparent, and visible – in and of itself.