ARTIST PROFILE

Jozef Mrva

  • Czech Republic (b. 1988 in Praha)
  • Currently in Praha, Czech Republic.
  • Artist, graphic designer curator working in the field of digital media, drawing and installation. Focusing on merging the fields of topology and philosophical speculation with artistic creation.

REPRESENTATION

ARTIST STATEMENT

Sum up the main character of your work, your long-term interests and themes.
My long-therm project is named "topological imagination". I am interested in "space" as an abstraction, a subject of topology, and its relations to society and politics. A space, that can be warped, folded, knotted, entangled and projected on other visual systems and diagrams. In my 3D videoanimations, digital prints and installation, I propose speculative topological spaces, as applied and present in our world. Through mathematical knots, fragments of maps and short texts, I create poems in space which refer to flows of capital, disappearing islands, flat-warth conspiracy, google imagery and other themes.

Describe the context of your work – what are your inspirational sources and theoretical starting points, which artists and tendencies do you consider as referential to your work.
I draw mainly from contemporary philosophy, mathematics, fringe science, internet memes and music. Wikipedia, internet memes and music, from which often I borrow names and lines of text. My main theoretical sources are Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, Reza Negarestani's Cyclonopedia, Benjamin Bratton's The Stack. Artist that I take as referential is Agnes Denes and her Philosophical drawings, in which she projects the globe onto different shapes, cosmology of Rudolf Sikora, concrete poems of Jiří Valoch, Iain Ball and his fascination with fringe internet culture, dark web surrealism of Jon Rafman and his 9 Eyes series.
My works often take names from extreme metal, which extremity and post-humanism is a huge inspiration for me.

Try to characterize what makes your work specific, wherein lies its force, what makes it different from the work of artists with similar approaches and themes.
I differ from artists that work with 3D and video and contemporary philosophy through focusing on cyclic/looped videos that use text not as a narrative, but as a line of poem. I don't work with a narrative and linearity and voice-overs. I focus on warping and curving space and lines, creating knotted visual poems. Videoloop is a form I developed mainly to keep text legible, therefore my underlying form is a poem. Loop, as a videoform and as a path of a camera is for me another element that is subject to topological thinking. Topology for me is also a tool of speaking about capital, internet, logistics, extractionism and other topics related to late-stage capitalism.

What is your work process like? Do you deal with preparation and research? How do you search for your themes? How do you choose the media you work in?
As a digital artist, my main source of inspiration comes from the internet. I keep a visual diary of found images that are mostly mathematical models, diagrams, chemical structures and other types of technical images, together with screenshots of maps. I create fragments of compositions 3D software which include knots, fragments of landscapes from satellites and look for a fitting line of texts that works as a metaphor, proposition, invitation for speculation.

What is your vision for the future? How do you want to develop your work and continue your previous projects/realizations? What is your long-term goal/dream?
My main goal is to expand more into physical space and create structures that encase the whole gallery and draw several works together, creating a link and giving them a new context. I want to focus more on material works, problematizing smooth printed surfaces that I use. I also want to focus on more theoretical aspects of my work, and create essays that would further develop some propositions that I use.


BIOGRAPHY

(1988, Prague)
2008 – 2012, Graphic Design, Department of Art and Design (BcA.), University of West Bohemia
2012 – 2015, Studio of Intermedia (MgA.), Faculty of Fine Arts, Brno University of Technology
2015 – 2020, PhD. at Faculty of Fine Arts, Brno University of Technology