Series - FotoSlovo 2026 - Category « Conceptual photography »

Obscurity

The process of becoming dark, or the state when light is blocked.

My research is grounded in connections with communities and environments beyond the bourgeois radar. I strive to find powerful metaphors for the state of imbalance and anxiety that defines this unrelenting period of history.

The protagonists I discover are those for whom the body no longer belongs to oneself—where neither you nor your body possess a self, a voice, or a say.

My protagonists exist on the fringes of visibility, in a state of vulnerability; they embody what is happening like no one else.

Working with such communities is deeply personal for me. It is connected to my family and the fates of my relatives. My uncle became homeless, slowly faded away, and died on the streets when I was a child. I understand the context of what is happening from the inside—as a generation that experienced stability and an unbroken connection to where it comes from. These are things that war and the state seek to steal: the right to a sense of self and of one's own belonging.

I began working on this series before the war, but the photographs absorbed the ambient anxiety that permeated the last few years. Isolation due to lockdown, the thickening fog of war, and the collapse of hope—all of this contributed to the staged iconography of the series. The main subjects are representatives of communities I had worked with previously.

These photographs can be seen as a deck of tarot cards, though the fortunes they conjure are doomed to be grim. "Obscurity" signifies the depths of inner darkness that consume the self. Using real-life locations that symbolize the abyss—rivers, swamps, forests, earth mounds, and beaches—I place my characters in spaces of existential solitude. Partly reminiscent of horror film stills, partly allegories of the somber state of souls on the other side of history, Obscurity is my attempt to crystallize the cloud of evil looming over my head.