Slovak photographer and cinematographer Martin Kollar literally finds his images along the roadside. With a strong sense for ambiguous narrative he explores in his works the essence behind the visible surface.

For Provisional Arrangement he roamed the roads of Europe for several months to question the notion of the provisional which is based on time and memory, change and deconstruction. He encountered leftovers, ruins, temporary solutions, accidental and off-the-wall arrangements, fragments of stories and of history. In his photographs he examines a world where the concept of permanence or even eternity does not exist. However, by capturing provisional arrangements with his camera, he turns them - with a subtle sense of humour - into monuments of day-to-day uncertainty. His images of the man aflame next to the Gazprom canister or the run-down space with pallets propping up the leaking roof are icons of the existential experience of precariousness.

Martin Kollar grew up du ring Communism with its key motto «With the Soviet Union for all Eternity». Back then, he and his contemporaries would add, laughing: «But not an hour langer». Since the collapse of the regime people of his generation have been fighting against endless variations of disintegration and the void left behind by the abandoned old dogmas. The artist comments on the experience of disintegration of permanence

into temporary solutions: We find ourselves in a complex world without a sense of permanence and certainty. We surround ourselves with temporary friends, we have temporary warnen, we have a temporary tooth replacement and we prefer temporary residencies to permanent address.

Provisional Arrangement was awarded the first Prix Elysee in 2014, which includes a grant to finalize the selected project and an associated publication. Persuaded by the quality of Martin Kollar's work, the Musee d'Elysee in Lausanne/Switzerland presented the body of work in an exhibition in 2016.

Martin Kollar was born in 1971 in Zilina in Czechoslovakia, now Slovak Republic. He studied camera at the Film Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava and since his graduation has worked as a freelance photographer and cinematographer. He was part of the extraordinary project This Place for which he created his series Field Trip. This Place has until now been presented at DOX in Prague, Czech Republic, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel, Norton Museum of Art in Florida, USA, and Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York. The artist received several grants and awards including the Oscar Barnack Award. As a cinematographer Martin Kollar has worked on a number of films, including Koza (2015), Velvet Terrorists (2013), Cooking History (2009), 66 Seasons (2003) and others. He made his directorial feature debut with the movie 5 October (2016).