Series - FotoSlovo 2026 - Category « Conceptual photography »

This body of work unfolds as an excavation of a relationship fractured by alcoholism. It begins with a diary in which my father recounts his time in rehabilitation centers, describing them as a “Holy Inquisition”, places where punishment is disguised as cure. Reading it, and encountering him through his own words, reshaped the figure I had constructed: what I had understood as abandonment revealed itself as part of a deeper chain of wounds. This shift made it impossible to approach his story in isolation. His absence is not singular, but entangled with a broader structure that normalizes male detachment and turns it into a pattern.

Working from fragments—memories, objects, and encounters—I began to reconstruct his image while reconfiguring our relationship in the present. In doing so, he emerges not only as an absent father, but as a body marked by contradiction, vulnerability, and inherited forms of loss.

The project brings together reframed paintings of drunken men, family archives, bottle remnants, and photographs from our encounters. These elements do not function as documents alone, but as overlapping symbolic layers. Within them, masculinity appears historically coded through sacrifice, guilt, discipline, and evasion. By placing my father within these constellations, his image moves between document and fiction, between what was lived and what has been culturally constructed, exposing a personal wound as a collective symptom and tracing how male absence is produced, inherited, and sustained.