Michaela Thelenová's series of quiet and ambiguous photographs of her north Bohemian village and an opulent Karlovy Vary hotel creates a refined and highly intriguing second exhibition for hunt kastner artworks, Prague's newly opened private contemporary art gallery.

These images, each depicting a person, space or object from Thelenová's real-life experience, are ablaze with a compelling mix of the old and new, the pure and impure, the pastoral and contemporary. Simple necessities of life — rural food, a basic shelter — are set alongside the processes of modern technology and material luxuries of dubious style, all photographed with the unruffled yet urgent eye of a responsive and susceptible inhabitant.

Thelenová, a finalist for the 2005 Chalupecký Award, makes personal and evocative photos in a semi-documentary style, predominantly of the Ústí region in which she lives. It is an area of the Czech Republic known more for its unpalatable recent history than its natural charm. (It was inhabited largely by Sudeten Germans until their uncompromising eviction following World War II, after which the region suffered massive industrial devastation under communism.)

Thelenová floats like an invisible spy through this world, capturing moments of oddness and intensity, revealing as much about her own highly sensitive consciousness as the complex, emotionally and morally charged environment she portrays.

These intimate and atmospheric moments, like something from a delicate horror film or opaque domestic drama, turn the viewer into detective, looking in upon the scenes, characters, hopes and fears of a small community. Captured in fragments — figures with faces cropped out of the frame, a single hand or an object — the subjects are identified and laid out before the viewer like exhibits at a trial, loaded with unclear secrets drawn from the semi-conscious.

The images depict a society caught in the grip of louche materialism, yet at the same time bound to a natural, hardy and wholesome kind of living that contains its own raw sensuality. This contrast is perhaps most evident in the vigorous shot of pure white snow in which a white plastic bag sits passively. The two whites, of palpably differing textural qualities and associations, are entrenched and inevitable partners.

Other shots of penetrating whiteness include one in which the snowy ground beside a rubbish bin is splattered with blood; a bland and brutal marble bathroom; the folds of a girl's white satin gown resting beneath the rough and muddied hands of a rural worker; and a blank and gaping computer screen, a glowing trace of wakefulness in a silent and darkened room. The images are astonishingly charged and sensual, aching with vulnerability and human strength and weakness, all heightened by the provocative order of the display. The sleek coldness of the vulgarly decorative bathroom is placed next to a bare yet warmly colored interior of an animal shelter laid with straw, juxtaposing a yearning for cleanliness and sophistication with natural grime and scent.

The striking display panels outside the gallery feature two starkly contrasting images that well address the title of the show: In one, a fragile girl's body is seen in a white embroidered night-dress as she loosely clasps a bulky TV remote control. The ugly rounded design of the gray plastic gadget seems crudely tactile in her thin pink hand, as though this child is being at once sullied and excited. The other panel shows a uniformed guard or policeman and a muzzled dog creeping into the frame — images of constraints on freedom.

The natural sensuality running through the exhibition is well balanced by a lively and open-minded critique of the moral and intellectual challenges of our time.