Fotograf Zone

Radan Haluzík’s book Město naruby. Vágní terén, vnitřní periferie a místa mezi místy¹ (City Upside Down: Vague Terrain, Inner Periphery, and Spaces Between Spaces), was recently published in the Czech Republic. The author collective sought to explore the post-industrial city with empathy, using the lens of inverted urbanism, and to define the emerging concepts associated with the distinctive aesthetics of excluded urban peripheries, known as vague terrain. Such a peripheral space-time, expelled by the metabolism of the urban organism, is perceived as a place lacking a clear functional designation and a site of potential promise.

In all broader social concepts, grand plans emerge, among which vague, empty spaces naturally appear over time. The collapse of any system, from time to time, contributes to its overall health, subjecting its established patterns to revision and renewal.

Whether we are discussing social, urban, interpersonal, or personal processes, we can identify a specific analogous constant in all of them: there is often a conflict between the formation of natural human physicality and its placement within an artificially created, power-constructed system—one that presumes perfection and demands absolute loyalty to higher rational principles. The true meaning and significance of bodies—both living and non-living—are revealed in their deviation from norms, wounds and scars, vulnerability, uncertainty, and contradictions, as well as in the fragility and diversity of gender and sexual identities.

A new understanding of the Anthropocene rejects the binary separation of nature and humanity. The concept of the Connections Unbroken exhibition is embedded in the poetic, enlivening perspective (Enlivenment) of German philosopher Andreas Weber,² which critically transcends the Enlightenment tradition. It seeks to build on efforts to overcome the modern metaphysics of dead matter and to acknowledge the profoundly creative processes inherent in all living entities. Our physical bodies are not, and never have been, separate from the immaterial mind—our rationality is intrinsically connected to poetry and emotion.

The exhibition, organized by the Milota Havránková Foundation, attempts to explore, across generations and through multiple media (not just photography), the intersections of these seemingly distant intellectual and creative frameworks and actors: the vague and normative terrains of nature, the city, society, and corporeality. Its concept is grounded in the idea that the most fundamental essence of bodily (and urban) architecture lies in relationships initiated by the body—relationships to another body, other bodies, communities, and societies.

The shared background of all authors, anchored outside the normative world of the body, brings into the exhibition an experience of inhabiting spaces that exist beyond the mainstream, yet remain crucial to the hope for a better world.

Text: Anna Vartecká

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Exhibition: Connections Unbroken
Artists: Ivan Pinkava (Czech Republic), Jan Durina (Slovakia), Josef Mach (Czech Republic)
Curator: Anna Vartecká
Organizer: Milota Havránková Foundation
Venue: Fotograf Gallery Zone
Dates: 21 March 2024 – 15 May 2025

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We would like to thank the Milota Havránková Foundation for co-organizing the exhibition. The exhibition is publicly funded by the Fund for the Support of Art in Slovakia (Fond na podporu umenia).

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All images: Connections Unbroken, Ivan Pinkava, Jan Durina, Josef Mach.
Photodocumentation: Jakub Tulinger

HALUZÍK, Radan (ed.) Město naruby. Vágní terén, vnitřní periferie a místa mezi místy, [City Upside Down: Vague Terrain, Inner Peripheries, and Places Between Places], Nakladatelství Academia, Prague, 2021.
WEBER, Andreas. Enlivenment: Towards a Fundamental Shift in the Concepts of Nature, Culture, and Politics. Böll Foundation, Berlin, 2013.

Ivan Pinkava

(1961) One of the key themes permeating the work of the exceptional Czech photographer Ivan Pinkava since the 1980s is the issue of the body oscillating between its physical essence and the symbolic anthropological, social, and cultural connotations attached to it. Corporeality—human and non-human/object-based—is one of the fundamental building blocks of Pinkava’s work. It is often presented as a site where a given system collapses, a space of heterotopia, a symbolic, subversive, disrupted, and denaturalized place. Or, precisely, through its scars and wounds, it emerges as a locus of untapped potential. In the background of Pinkava’s work, a symbolic vertical dimension often resonates, reflecting human action and direction—the pursuit of higher principles and transcendence into the spiritual aspects of our existence. From another perspective, however, verticality can also be understood as a hieratic system that contemporary art actively challenges by questioning the very pillars of such social structures, and the power dynamics they uphold. While the human body’s destructive entanglement in the collapse of the vertical axis may evoke parallels to the current global crisis caused by an oppressive hieratic system, sustained engagement with the artist’s photographic work reveals a profound insight into these anthropologically constructed frameworks. Many of Pinkava’s photographs contain a distinctive archetypal parable that draws from widely recognized myths that have undergone countless cultural trials, misinterpretations, exploitations, and emptying of meaning—only to return to us in the form of ever more beautiful images, which remain, at their core, subversive and defiant. Thus, to simultaneously amplify the beauty and a subversive, blasphemous tone without losing the point or force of the voice is akin to a Greenaway-esque cinematic dimension translated into photography. Above all, in posthumanist times, the body functions as a sign through which we can critically engage with the vague, ambiguous, and often elusive terrains of our existence—leaving obsessive and metaphorical scars on both the artist’s and the viewer’s imagination.

Jan Durina

(1988) is a young Slovak interdisciplinary visual artist who, through a wide range of media, creates a peculiar universe of beings, identities, and narratives that seem to originate from this world only as its distorted mirror echoes. His work is not strictly autobiographical, but questions of personal identity and sexuality, mental health, and the intimate aspects of his own experience are deeply embedded in it. His imagination, shaped by melancholy and the deprivation of someone who rejects a normalized, stereotyped world authentically and painfully, often leads him to explore corporeality and the human figure. And it becomes “quite evident which characters resonate with him and in which he playfully or ironically comments on overflowing testosterone-fueled egos.3” His artistic thinking is informed by critical concepts of queer, feminist, and ecofeminist theories, as well as Autotheory. At the heart of his work lies a common, overarching theme: mental health, human vulnerability, and care for others, alongside collaboration and the dynamics of non-hierarchical relationships. Human fragility has long ceased to be dogmatically suppressed as a weakness—art was among the first disciplines to recognize the need for its rehabilitation. Durina’s photographs, textiles, hand-embroidered and embellished objects, and drawings serve as mental maps of his body’s trajectories—collapsing, temporarily vague, refusing to fulfill expectations placed upon it, resisting through its wounds and fractures, and striving to love itself just as it is. In doing so, it becomes fully human.

Josef Mach

(1994) is Josef Mach, a student at the Body Design Studio at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Brno University of Technology. His artistic practice primarily revolves around installation, sometimes extending into the realm of performance. He is particularly interested in emotions that stem from collective human experience and resonate with broader social phenomena. Mach is drawn to the principles of paradox and absurdity. By combining elements of pop culture with the profound aspects of human existence, his work takes on subversive dimensions. He seeks to reveal the energy that binds matter, emotions, and the body into a single, infinite stream of interconnected—though often contradictory—connections. Borrowing from Bruno Latour’s concept of an entangled and egalitarian network of agency—where people, inanimate objects, institutions, and even ideas collectively shape reality—Mach challenges the anthropocentric perspective of thought and the crises it has produced.