Martin Sekera

Throughout the year, the research around my dissertation Annihilation Reflected has been at the centre of my practice – specifically Milan Kundera and Rainer Maria Rilke and his semi-autobiographical novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Rilke in turn led me to the Musée de Cluny, to the tapestries of La Dame à La Licorne and to the mysterious Narwhal’s tooth. Through Rilke I entered a new world of emptiness, darkness, alienation, sexual desires and reflections. A new world where reality and truth are blurred. Reflections continue to fascinate me, especially the power they posses over our vision, creating illusions – deleting and fragmenting parts of the image, of the moment we seek to immortalise forever and ultimately creating emptiness. Reflections also attract me, their emptiness signifies the loneliness Rilke felt when he walked the streets of Paris. I want to explore them, I want to inhabit them. The museum itself is an endless alley of vitrines, all giving their possessions boundless reflections. I walk the museum’s insides until exhausted, lost in it, not wanting to find my way out. 

The darkness in my photographs is the abyss I throw upon their subjects. I wish to alienate what I photograph. Isolate it so that it stands on its own, singular in the vast reality of the everyday. 

Kundera’s mastery is to elevate human gestures to a level where they posses an immense sexual energy; to where they are fetishised. I believe a sexual attraction drives our curiosity. Thus my desires are embedded in my photographs. Through my work I am exploring my sexuality, seeking attraction, the desired – male body. It is present, waiting to be discovered, wanting to be entered. 

As the leaning unicorn’s horn is piercing through the emptiness of the white wall, so the photographs aim to pierce through the viewer’s imagination.