Martin Kollar

1971, Slovak, Born in Žilina, Czechoslovakia (now the Slovak Republic)
Winner - Prix Elysée 2015

Slovak photographer, Martin Kollar was born in 1971 in Žilina, Czechoslovakia (now the Slovak Republic). He studied at the Academy for Performing Arts in Bratislava before continuing his career as a freelance photographer and cinematographer. He has worked on a number of documentary and fictive films: Autoportrait (director), Ball (producer) and as a cameraman Velvet Terrorists, Cooking History, Across the Border: Five Views from Neighbours, 66 Seasons, Ladomirova Morytates and Legends, and the animated film In the Box.

In the realm of photography, Kollar has received a number of prestigious grants and awards including the 3PPP photography grant, Oscar Barnack Award in Germany and the Backlight Photography Award in Finland. His work has been exhibited at the Maison européenne de la photographie, Paris, MOCA Shanghai and the Museum of Art Guandong (China), amongst other venues.

Website

Project

Provisional Arrangement

I grew up during Communism with its key motto „With the Soviet Union for all Eternity“. Back then, we would add, laughing: but not an hour longer. This has been, until this day, one of the few experiences I’ve had with eternity.

Since then, my life has been filled with negotiating its many temporary situations and solutions. People of my generation have grown up, we are middle-aged now. Temporariness is slipping out of our hands, we are fighting against endless variations of disintegration and the void left behind the abandoned old dogmas.

We find ourselves in a complex world without a sense of permanence and certainty. We surround ourselves with temporary friends, we have temporary women, we have a temporary tooth replacement and we prefer temporary residencies to permanent address. Provisional Arrangement is a project concerned with situations which contain an element of uncertainty and mystery. It will be a photographic record/portrayal capturing the disintegration of permanence into temporary and provisional.