Mojmir Bures

My photography intends to explore the relationship between identity and space. My work is a search for land in an unknown territory, which I think is nowadays a very important topic with regards to the different forms of population displacements.

Moreover, I am trying to question the connection between land and technology, and how one influences the other. My practice is shaping a fictional land and forming a dialogue between the photography of studio space and nature. The project is divided into two parts, the first is depicting objects of photographic studio space, the second is trying to recreate the artificial illusive representation of nature. Metallic photography stands should symbolically evoke the cold character of the construction site of urban architecture. I am physically creating landscapes by utilising empty monochrome papers within the sterile environment of the photography studio: to create a meditative invisible world shaped from these papers.

I experimented with a range of subjects and objects in the studio and explored their materiality and the possibility of representing movement and speed between still frames as I install and stage them differently.

It’s this shift between compositions that evokes within me a feeling of curiosity surrounding a moment I experienced travelling between my home town of Prague and London.

I was sat amongst waves of people, with public transport passing me in many manners, back and forth, and I was hit with a sense of movement and stillness. I was aware of the endless presence of constructions and am seeking to, in my own way, express this sensibility.

However, images of the landscape are a representation of land bound to no one, which for me symbolises freedom and a place of rescue, even when that place might be seen as destroyed.

My work was most influenced by the Czech photographers Josef Sudek and Jaromír Funke. I realised the importance of a significant Czech photography style for my own work. Especially the way artists from the era of New Objectivity reshaped and recreated subjects within a photographic language, in turn, becoming the most influential inspiration for my latest body of work.

I have decided to pay homage to Czech Avantgarde artists in terms of aesthetic values and concepts. I realised how this influence can define my identity as a photographer.

I named my work Proces which is a Czech word describing photographic processes and also the Czech title of Franz Kafka's The Trial which inspired my series.