Catharsis

Following her academic research, The Ambiguity of Visual Representations of Trauma, Zhengová now brings to the forefront a visual analysis in the form of a photobook - Catharsis. Concerned with the question: “how can one represent something visually that is by its very essence unrepresentable without banalizing it, trivializing it, spectacularizing it, and finally repressing it for a second time?”, she presents both archival and newly created imagery to address such problematics.

Catharsis prioritizes a lived experience and explores traumatic memory not from the perspective of moral and medical classifications but instead, as an open artistic inquiry. As such, this publication is concerned with the connections between photography and trauma, between unutterable shock and the most elevated or supreme form of human communication and representation, between traumatic non-experience and aesthetic experience.

“I believe that the creation and viewing of trauma- related art can plant the seed for mutual acceptance and understanding in society, an ethical process that ultimately lifts existing stigmas surrounding different traumas and helps those suffering from trauma recover and ultimately achieve catharsis.”