Provisional Arrangement

Winner of the 2016 Prix Elysée, Martin Kollar’s new work, Provisional Arrangement, considers that which is temporary in a world made up of provisional situations and solutions. "We are tenants of culture", wrote Nicolas Bourriaud, foreseeing a world of precarious inhabitation of ideas. “I grew up in Czechoslovakia during the Communist era,” says Kollar, “and with the motto, with the Soviet Union for all Eternity – which has been one of my few experiences with eternity... People of my generation fight against the void left behind the abandoned dogmas.” It is this world that Kollar turns to, one of aborted eternities and slackened certainties – to situations which reveal the disintegration of permanences, capturing their fall into the provisional. 

Martin Kollar was born in Zilina, Czechoslovakia (now Slovakia). He studied at the Academy of Performing Arts Bratislava and has been working as a freelance photographer and cinematographer since he graduated. As a cinematographer, Martin has worked on a number of films, including Koza (2015), Velvet Terrorists (2013), Cooking History (2009), 66 Seasons (2003) and his directorial feature debut 5 October (2016). He has received several grants and awards, including the Prix Elysee and Oscar Barnack Award and his work has been exhibited across the world, including the Brooklyn Museum in New York, the Slovak National Gallery (Bratislava), Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, Tel Aviv Museum of Art and Musée de l'Élysée (Lausanne). His previous books include Nothing Special (2008), Cahier (2011), Field Trip (MACK, 2013) and Catalogue (Slovak National Gallery, 2015).