Libuše Jarcovjáková
Book Review
Artist: Libuše Jarcovjáková
Photobook: T-Club
Publisher: un-titled
Designer: Ania Nałęcka-Milach
Specs: Softcover, 165 x 200 mm, 256 pages
Price: €50
“The more liberated you are, the less willing you will be to suppress your impulses, play the part that is handed to you, subject yourself to the constraints expected of polite people.” – Nuar Alsadir
Libuše Jarcovjáková’s T-Club is a book about impulses left unrestrained, about living against the grain. T-Club was a basement refuge in socialist Prague, a place where the outcasts, the dreamers, the beautiful and the unbeautiful could be held by the night, hidden but free, in the thick, warm grip of cigarette smoke and super-cooled vodka.
Communism sought to sand down difference into conformity. To make things straight, disciplined, predictable. Left-handedness, like queerness, like any deviation, was seen as something to be corrected, re-trained, unlearned for the sake of uniformity. My mother would pick up a fork with her left hand, and someone would move it to her right. She’d hold a pencil, and the teacher would force her to switch. The Soviet propaganda machine even had statistics “proving” that left-handed people were more likely to become criminals, that they were more prone to mental illness, to homosexuality. Hands were forced into unnatural movements, into the acceptable rhythm of the collective. It wasn’t until the mid-80s that these policies were officially abandoned, but the thinking lasted much longer.
T-Club can be considered the place for the left-handed. A subterranean space beneath Jungmannovo náměstí, right in the center of Prague, behind a bouncer who decided who was worthy. There were two gay clubs in the entire city, two places where the misfits could slip into something more comfortable, into someone else’s arms, into a night that might bring love or pleasure.
“(…) The lens here is incidental, a quiet witness rather than an intruder. She records the rhythm of bodies in motion, the weight of a night that has no guarantee of return.“
Jarcovjáková was there, not as an observer but as a member of the family. Her images are grainy, blurred and flash-lit, filled with sweat and neon and late-night negotiations of longing. They show what remains when reality is left at the door. It’s a performance, of course, but not for the camera. The lens here is incidental, a quiet witness rather than an intruder. She records the rhythm of bodies in motion, the weight of a night that has no guarantee of return.
She seems to document queer time in the way José Esteban Muñoz describes it: not a backward-looking lament but a force propelling toward a horizon where queerness is not just survival but a future being made in real time. “Queerness is not yet here,” Muñoz writes. “Queerness is an ideality. We are not yet queer. But we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality.”
“(…) A gay club in 1980s Czechoslovakia was a paradox, a contradiction within a system that demanded conformity.“
The photographs, taken between 1983 and 1985, teem with bodies pressed together in laughter, in conversation, in seduction. They move with a haptic quality, where sight alone doesn’t suffice—you feel the images, their weight, their urgency. A gay club in 1980s Czechoslovakia was a paradox, a contradiction within a system that demanded conformity. The StB, the secret police, watching, listing names, noting behaviors. Monitoring these rooms where people kissed and danced and shed their daytime disguises. Despite all the circumstances, the club operated fiercely until it was no longer needed, it died with the regime’s collapse.
The design of T-Club mirrors the energy of the club itself—bold, tactile, unrestrained. The bright pages and the glossy plastic foil cover heighten the book’s atmosphere, making it feel like an artifact pulled straight from a night of excess. The reflective surfaces catch the light like sweat on the skin, the neon flash of a moment about to slip away. This book demands touch, flipping through feels like moving through the club’s feverish glow. The design choices enhance the sense of immersion, the book is still pulsating, and a party is still unfolding in your hands.
T-Club documents jouissance, that excess of pleasure that tips into transgression. Hedonism as defiance. Roland Barthes describes jouissance as something that disrupts order, that undoes meaning. Here, in this underground club, meaning is deliberately undone. Desire is unregulated, bodies belong to themselves, and for a few hours, the outside world ceases to exist.
The photographs carry something of Bohemia, the mountain-ringed kingdom that once stood independent, before the invasions, before the Habsburgs, before the USSR. A land that was its own before it was forced into submission. And like the land, Bohemianism has always meant something fluid, something untethered to expectation. To be Bohemian is to live in a space carved by will, instinct, and desire.
I wonder what it’s like now, to walk past where the entrance of T-Club used to be. Does the air still hold something of those nights? We lose places like these because they are never meant to be museums. They exist in the moment, and then they don’t. But Jarcovjáková’s photographs keep something of it alive.
T-Club is available for purchase via un-titled here.
Libuše Jarcovjáková
is a Prague-based photographer well-known for her diaristic and hedonistic depictions of nightlife, minority groups, and marginalised people in the 1970s and 1980s in Prague and West Berlin, alongside her self-portraiture. The major retrospective of her work can be seen in her monograph Evokativ (2019) while her portrayal of the inhabitants of a clandestine gay bar she visited almost nightly, was published under the title T-Club (2024).
Un-Titled
is an independent publishing house and a platform for photography and visual art founded by Lucie Černá. Their approach stems from the idea of being open to interpretation. Every project is a living body of work connected by a central idea and an ability to transform into different forms. They work closely with artists and showcase their body of work by publishing books, curating exhibitions, and site-specific projects. They aim to ignite a more inclusive and open way of looking at visual art.
Text by Linda Zhengová
Curator of Discarded Magazine & XXX
She is a photographer and writer dealing with the topics of trauma, representation and sexuality.