Pavel Maria Smejkal
FATESCAPES
Pavel Maria Smejkal
FATESCAPES
This work, a series of images that are completely familiar yet strikingly alien, seems at first to address primarily historical themes, including the history of human events as well as the history of the photographic medium itself. But more fundamentally it stems from current perspectives, reflections, and technical possibilities. Thanks to the rise of digitalization, the widespread sharing of information on the Internet, and the postmodern approach to themes of originality, reality, and truth, photography has become something very different from what it was when it first came into being. Fatescapes is, among other things, a commentary on these current trends, situations, and changing reality. This work also addresses questions of artistic re-appropriation. Even though in Fatescapes the author uses large parts of the original images, the result is a certain negation of the original meaning or function of the piece. Fatescapes, under the title evoking the content of the original photographs reflecting fateful events of global importance, and evoking landscape as an anchor of our earthly existence, represents a work focusing on tough turning points of humanity in the past and at the same moment raising questions about the present and the future. Both the fishing industry of Höfn and the industrial production of Maribor have generated architectural spaces and surfaces of similar materiality and aesthetics that bridge the 22° difference in longitude and their cultural specificities, generating a type of transnational industrial habitat.
Pavel Maria Smejkal
Pavel Maria Smejkal (born 1957 in Czech Republic) is a photographic artist living and working in Kosice, Slovakia. He is a chairman of non-profit association PhotoART Centrum, Slovakia. His work has been shown in exhibitions in over the world. He was a finalist of the Critical Mass Book Award and Daylight PhotoAward. Amongst collection acquired his work is the Musée Français de la Photographie, Bièvres (Paris), his works was published in many magazines and books around the world.