Martin Kollar

Provisional Arrangement is the concretization of Martin Kollar’s project submitted for the first Prix Elysée launched in 2014 with the support of Parmigiani Fleurier. The prize includes a grant to finalize the selected project and an associated publication, and, persuaded by the quality of the Slovak photographer’s work, the Musée de l’Elysée also decided to put on an exhibition.

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 thirty 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 which the temporary governs the day-to-day when it is more a question of adapting oneself to endless variations than to being an integral part of a particular period and place. It is a world where the sensation of permanence does not exist, poetically rendered by this photographic journey that captures the disintegration of the permanent
towards the temporary and provisional.