The Serious High Jinx Of Martin Kollar

You gotta love Martin Kollar. He just won the 2015 Prix Elysée. I was cheering for Mari Bastashevski, but I can’t complain with the ultimate choice of Kollar. His work is dark and hilarious. Kollar freezes awkward. In his world, military men are less heroic, stunt men are suicide cases, and practice makes imperfect. Is this shit even real?

Kollar travels through research labs, checkpoints, sports events, training scenarios, parliaments, dentists, barrios and wheat fields. He isolates people from context and time to create solitary and uncanny moments. The list of photographers interested in documenting simulation and facade is long — Lisa Barnard, Paul Shambroom, Yann Mingard, Richard Barnes, Max Pinckers, An-My Lê to name a few — so it is a little surprising Kollar’s work stands out for me and truly strikes a chord. I reckon this is because his work is consistently good. And by good, I mean convincing. I am convinced he has looked really hard to find these scenes. I am convinced he is a good editor, or has good editors around him. I am convinced of his skill because it’s hard to make this look so easy. Check out his notebooks.

Photography is “an intermediary stage, a kind of transitional memory between two times” says Kollar who, according to the Prix Elysée, “belongs to the temporary generation, moving from job to job, from apartment to apartment, relationship to relationship.”

Originally from Slovakia, Kollar’s projects build upon ideas from the previous. He constructs huge stepping stones and jumps from one to the next when he feels he’s considered the ideas central to each project from all angles. “Then the next idea comes, which usually corrects the previous one,” he says. “My projects are generally linked to limited territories and spaces, whether it be Eastern Europe, the European Parliament or Israel.”

Kollar’s photographs evoke a certain amount of wandering and wondering. For Prix Elysée, Kollar took a geographically unspecific overview.

“Provisional Arrangement, conceived in the spirit of a road movie, aims to capture those moments when the permanent becomes provisional,” says Prix Elysée.

Again, not an easy task. To locate and understand the gaps you’ve got to have a good grasp on what the formed and formal landscape of knowledge is for a places … or in Kollar’s cases many (unidentified) places.

In the Museum of Military History in Dresden, he photographed an installation showing pigeons wearing tiny cameras during the Second World War.

“They evoke today’s drones. In this case, photography is an intermediary stage, a kind of transitional memory between two times. That’s what I want to work on, filling the void, building something in the interstices,” says Kollar. “I wanted to do work that isn’t linked to any place, which revolves around temporality and provisionality.”

In winning the Prix Elysée, Martin Kollar won 80,000 Swiss Francs. He has one year to make an exhibition and a book which extends Provisional Arrangement. It’ll go on show at at Museum Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland in September 2016. We already know he has a wit when it comes to installation.

Good luck Martin.