Soft Turns
Behind the High Grass

Soft Turns is the artistic partnership of Sarah Jane Gorlitz and Wojciech Olejnik. A post-war travel book authored by Czech travelers and filmmakers Jiří Hanzelka and Miroslav Zikmund discovered at a flea market has inspired much of their recent practice. P19720 is the license plate of the Tatra 87 passenger vehicle that Hanzelka and Zikmundfound travelled in across Africa, Latin America and eventually Asia. Their journeys became a metaphor for addressing ‘otherness’ within the context of the social, historical, political and psychological milieu of the post war period. As the artists familiarized themselves with the book—which had by now lost all of its text, leaving behind only enigmatic sepia images—inevitably their work began to parallel the original authors’ journeys and research. Recording notes and observations, logging and filming their own travels; they became artist-anthropologists referencing the book as a rough guide to their explorations.