One Day Every Day

In my oeuvre, I have been exploring how a commonplace routine, stereotypes, social interactions and role-playing affects our existence, relationships, and ultimately, our lives. Titled One Day Every Day, it deals with inability to escape the social pressure imposed by the world of politics, media, and digital presence of people and things. The (social) expectations how to behave, what to do, how to react in certain situations evolve rapidly and often diverge from what we have inherited, how we were educated, how our environment had shaped us, how our moral compass had been calibrated during youth. It is this mixture of behavioral patterns that we seem unable to tackle, and on the other hand, new, accelerated forms of mutual influence, that make up most of the uncertainty/volatility/ fluidity in our lives.

By applying the notion of functional fixedness (using an object only in accordance with its intention) to human interactions, I re-conceptualize the fixedness to a mere individuals’ existence in the contemporary time and space – to certain roles, behavioral patterns, common typologies etc. I seek the boundaries where the traditional usefulness of routine becomes pathological. Masks are in fact self-hybridizations of a woman’s (and generally human’s) natural appearance with what she/he is expected to look like by “society”. So many people are eager to satisfy the society’s expectations, considering them natural, without even thinking about the root concept, which yields just the opposite – artificiality in behavior and restraint in personal freedom.

Zuzana Pustaiová (1990) is Slovak photographer living in Bratislava. She focuses to a sociological-psychological orientated topics, personal stories and criticism of the state of society with humor and irony. In January 2022 she completed doctoral degree in fine arts at Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava. She was awarded numerous awards in contemporary photography and she exhibited internationally.