At Tickbird&Rhino we aim for relaxing evenings filled with great people, interesting ideas & fantastic conversation and on a friday night in May we were at the Café des Taxis in Prague bringing you just that! 

We had Tereza Violet Stehlíková talking with us about her work as an artist-researcher exploring liminal states: those in-between moments when familiar ways of seeing the world begin to dissolve but before new understandings have yet to fully form to take their place. Drawing on ideas from her recent book Exiled From Our Bodies, Tereza reflected upon the unique capacity of art to open such threshold spaces, not by offering ready-made answers or simple solutions, but by helping us stay with ambiguity, uncertainty and the unresolved. 

Tereza suggests that these shifts in attention often emerge in everyday life through what she calls the infra-ordinary: fleeting, easily overlooked moments in which our perception subtly changes. It may be sunlight illuminating a room in a new way, the heightened atmosphere of an inner state, or simply arriving at a familiar place from an unfamiliar direction. In such moments the ordinary becomes strange again, and new forms of perception — and perhaps new insights — begin to emerge.

The artist Petra Janoušková joined Tereza, exploring these in-between places from a different perspective by taking us on a journey into shamanism. She gave us an outline of the journey shamans make into the three worlds (Lower, Middle, and Upper) and made direct connections between shamanic consciousness and CG Jung’s concept of active imagination and the distinction between ordinary and non-ordinary reality. In addition, Petra examined shamanic practices in relation to the arts and the creative process, touching upon its place in ritual and performance, particularly in the work of Marina Abramović, Joseph Beuys, and Rick Rubin.

Believing that everyone has access to these higher states of consciousness, whether through artistic expression, meditation or shamanic journeying, Petra suggests that moving between different realms—inner and outer, the familiar and the Other—enables individuals to better understand their everyday lives while moving towards a greater sense of wholeness and integration.