Martin Kollar: Provisional Arrangement

Provisional Arrangement is the realisation of the project that Martin Kollar submitted for the Prix Elysée launched in 2014 with the support of Parmigiani Fleurier. As provided by the prize, of which he is the first winner, the Slovak photographer received a financial contribution to finalise his project and to publish the book of it. Free to choose a publisher, he decided to work with MACK (London), with which the Musée de l’Elysée is associated as co-publisher.

Convinced by the quality of his work, the museum proposed him, in addition, to produce an exhibition presented from September 21 to December 31, 2016 and curated by Lydia Dorner. Provisional Arrangement is thus the result of two years of work with Martin Kollar, confirming the museum’s commitment to sustaining contemporary photographers.

For several months, Martin Kollar roamed the roads of Europe and searched through his personal archives to bring together in a rich corpus his idea of the provisional—a difficult subject to address visually. Nevertheless, Kollar didn’t waver and, with Provisional Arrangement, offers us around 30 images that all, in their own way, explore the notion of temporary—and, implicitly, the far broader notion of memory in the process of (de)construction.

Brought up in communist Czechoslovakia, the artist has always been fascinated by the clash between the unchanging aspects of our society and those that become a fleeting part of it to compensate for life’s trials and tribulations. In this way, he presents images of the backdrop for a generation for whom the provisional governed everyday life, when it was more a question of adapting to endless variations than putting down lasting roots in a defined time and place—a world in which durability could not be counted on—rendered poetically by this photographic journey capturing the disintegration of the permanent in favor of the temporary and provisional.

The book, designed by the artist himself alongside Grégoire Pujade-Lauraine, is his very own expression of the subject he tackles. The entire conception of the publication, from the choice of materials to the way in which the photographs appear, often in double page spreads, echoes the theme and gives it the perfect setting.

Presented simultaneously is an exhibition of Wojciech Zamecznik, an influential figure on the postwar Polish art scene. A pioneer in combining photography with graphic art, he is famous for his numerous posters, and his sphere of activity covered publishing, music, cinema and exhibition design. Photography in all its forms is the first international presentation of his photographic work.