16 march 2026, Flor Linckens
Last chance: identity as a process in ‘Paper Stars’
In ‘Paper Stars’, the solo exhibition by Tony Dočekal that will be on view at Art Gallery O-68 in Velp until 22 March, a project unfolds that has developed over several years. The presentation brings together photography and video and follows Lyric, a girl growing up in a remote border region in the southern United States. What began as a single portrait evolved into a long-term collaboration shaped by trust, change and time.
Dočekal first met Lyric in 2022, when she was nine years old and living with her family in a school bus at a motorhome site in El País, Arizona. This encounter marked the beginning of an extended trajectory in which a relationship gradually took form. By returning time and again, the work shifts from an isolated image to a series that visualises a development, without fixing or directing it. This is essential: in 'Paper Stars’, identity is not approached as something stable, but rather as something in constant motion. Lyric grows up, moves and develops, still off-grid, while her relationship to the world around her continues to change. Here, adolescence emerges as a process of searching, adjusting and redefining, a phase in which one becomes increasingly autonomous and self-aware.
This way of working reveals much about Dočekal’s practice. Her slow, analogue process provides the time needed to build a connection with the people she photographs. She makes them visible and empowers them. The camera is not a tool for creating distance, but the opposite: a means of drawing closer. The subjects shift from ‘the other’ to individuals with their own perspective, within a more equal relationship between photographer and protagonist, which is grounded in trust. At the same time, space remains for ambiguity and for the viewer’s own interpretation.
Simultaneously, a broader context comes into view. The region in which Lyric is growing up cannot be separated from wider societal shifts in the United States, where ideas of freedom, autonomy and security are under pressure while also being projected onto the rest of the world. Dočekal does not make this context explicit, but shows how individual lives are always shaped in relation to larger social, economic and political structures.
Dočekal’s sustained engagement and her way of working through personal relationships run throughout her practice. She spent several years in the United States working on projects focused on communities living outside established structures. This resulted in her first book ‘The Color of Money and Trees’. In it, she explores questions around freedom, connection and the value of material wealth. She photographs these communities without romanticising their way of life, while remaining attentive to poverty, trauma, addiction and structural inequality. At the same time, she refuses to reduce them to victims or outsiders, instead presenting them as layered individuals. In doing so, she raises questions about what we consider the norm, about dominant social conventions and, by extension, about what it means to call a place home.
Dočekal studied at ArtEZ University of the Arts and has received various awards, including the Olympus Young Talent Award and the Zilveren Camera Portrait Prize. In 2024, she was nominated by VOID for the FUTURES Photography platform. Her work has been included in the collections of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Museum MORE and Museum Arnhem. Together with her partner Bas Timmer, founder of Sheltersuit, she also supports communities without stable housing.
