ARTIST PROFILE

Milan Mazúr

  • Slovakia (b. 1989 in Žilina)
  • Currently in Prague, Czech Republic.
  • 2009 - 2013 Academy of fine arts - Intermedia, SK 2013 - 2016 Studio intermedia confrontation - Umprum, CZ 2018 - 2022 Academy of Fine Arts in Prague - doctorate degree, studio of new media, CZ

CONTACT & LINKS

ARTIST INFO

ARTIST STATEMENT

https://youtu.be/3aqgXxaUC2Y
De-constructs predetermined social roles. I continuously focus on the nuances of moving images, experimental film and site-specific projects. Often from the context to the attributes of individual characters, space as a plane of place, time and by building fictitious imaginations of non-narrative videos. From these phenomena, I focus on emptied narration, magical realism, elements of slow cinema, found footage, fictional documentary and site-specific installations. The effort of hints of indirect constructs, uncertainty of time and place are often times motives in building realities into a free plane of interpretation. I find in various levels of post-production the plane of work as a process. With the help of editing composition to realization in specific spaces, the intention is to produce a certain ambivalence in the level of video essays with overlap into abstract non-narratives. Thematically, I cover the issues of personal mythology, the symptoms of today's globalized society, to the study of the very construction of the principles of individual videos. In projects, balancing the theme of the narrative in the genre overlaps of media film. I deconstruct the nuances of video and film in the installation space folders. In the gallery space, where the film image is composed of projections or material-architectural constructs. I am interested in the presence of the viewer as a user composing narrative plots - he is confronted with the time presence with the film. Content overlaps in global topics, consumption, spectacularity, technology, migration or ecological links. By parasitizing on with expressions of spectacularity from which I move on to the subversive micro events of the characters and their motive. Thematically personal mythologies. I use the concept of a character many times as a hybrid form, where the character is represented by, for example, an animal or an object in the context of references to extraterrestrial aesthetics, the current issue of migration - the so-called transition points of countries. Knowledge comes only as flashes, the text is thunder to us much later. This is about our perception of the world of images, and especially of technical images, once remarked by Walter Benjamin. Videos, films, video installations and installations are inextricably linked with the world of images as a space of narration and mutual mixing of general memory with personal accounts. For me, the medium of the moving image is not a linear axis of traditional cinematic speech, and yet time, plot and stage play have a crucial role in it. The formally expressive language of the film camera and the use of a combination of shots actually return in many respects, although in the guise of contemporary visuality, to the understanding of image language as once radically formulated by Dziga Vertov - the filmmaker is the narrator through image, its dynamics and subjectivized image space. However, one cannot overlook the tendency to constantly return from all intermediate approaches (installations, objects, etc.) to the central motif of creation, namely the visual narration. The intersection of personal mythology, moving in its specific order to another perception of space-time, with the constant aggression of the surrounding mass spectacularity. This closed space of an intimate, yet constantly alienating environment, where narration is actually defined by emptying - becomes a negative imprint defined by form, the formal approach itself. We are waiting for the drama. We expect the drama. It’s not a drama. It’s a game. A construct in which we play games. The breath is a reaction, the word is a reaction, also the silence is a reaction. Is it a situation, where nothing needs to be said? Now? But we expected it: The drama, the speed, the shock. The shock is only a myth. An online stereotype, time, and water.


BIOGRAPHY

Milan Mazúr (7.10.1989)

Visual artist and filmmaker. 1989 born in Žilina, Slovakia. He lives and works in Prague.

Milan Mazúr is a PhD student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, in his dissertation he researches the phenomenon of emptied narration. He creates worlds that intertwine and connect with each other in a fluid line of synapses, creating a kind of endless film story with autobiographical features. Ján is a real and imaginative character, who also appears in the previous film Casaria. The immersive beauty we see in the individual parts of his films is a mixture of nebulae and ice slurry of floating meanings.

Milan Mazur (* 1989) is the creator whose visual language is constantly balancing the edge between the spectacularity of contemporary mass visuality and its questioning, including the critical and social subtext. His videos and films enter a wider installation framework in which the author often uses the contrast of common objects and expressive deconstruction. It constantly moves between the submissiveness of the artificial sweetener of consumer culture and hides ubiquitous existential anxiety. In Slovakia, the born artist is a graduate of the studio of inter-city confrontations of the Prague UMPRUM and currently lives and works in Prague.




PUBLICATIONS

  • It is not only about spaces, whether gallery or imaginary ones, cities or communities, but it is also about time and different ways of narration. It is through time that we realize our lives and through stories that we understand crucial things such as good and evil, us or them. However, the question is how it is possible to talk about today’s situation split between various perspectives, overloaded by so many different problems and movements. Simple universal stories are not enough for us anymore; we share neither the same time nor the rhythm. MILAN MAZÚR is heading in this direction; his film and installation deal with the return to imagination, cultural translation or non-linear way of narration. Perhaps it is about refugees or the church as seen in the movie Nostalgia by Andrei Tarkovsky, about an anonymous rave party and an eagle wearing a mask. The individual moments do not come together into a compact narration; on the contrary, they seem to be pointy, stabbing. 

      The key moment here comes in the form of closed passages, walled-up doors, the impossibility to reach another place and peace. But it appears as if exactly in these dynamics in today’s accelerating, fragmentary world, Milan has restored faith in the whole, in sharing and in a subliminal but universal power of the picture. Contemporary society shows many signs of traumatic experience (the inability to “catch up with” the West, the denial of climate change, the recurring fear of communism, the absence of visions and alternatives). No simple or linear stories (about brighter tomorrows, naughty environmentalists or neo-Marxists) will help to solve these problems; on the contrary, we need to build sensitivity to discontinuity, broken relationships and an uncertain world – precisely the kind of sensitivity presented by Milan Mazúr. 


    Vaclav Janoscik, publication Ecology of desire, 2019


BIBLIOGRAPHY

  • short film casaria, 2019

    Casaria is a film deprived of narrative linearity. It unfolds dialectically, without following a temporal sequentiality, arranging its various parts according to a constellated structure. Within this non-linear structure, there are elements that are transversally present throughout the film, which, at the same time, unify its various parts and highlight their contrasting aspects, thus assuming different meanings in consonance with what is represented by the images. The fading black and white colours, the oneiric sounds and the slow motion that represent the aesthetic character of the whole film seem to hint an unstable reality that struggles to affirm itself; although, the causes of this instability vary in the course of the film. In the case of the footage shot in Casaria, those aesthetic features recall a reality that is unstable because it is slowly reconfiguring itself. The shattered lives of the inhabitants of Casaria are now being recomposed and new social and existential configurations are emerging. By contrast, in the scenes that take place in the amusement park, at the party and on the beach, the vanishing colours, the hazy sounds and the slow motion remind of a reality that is slowly declining. However, tragically, no one notices it and everyone continues to carry out their meaningless activities. T H E B L A C K CLOUD Another element that keeps reappearing in the film is a black cloud that threateningly wanders around, overlooked by the characters of the film. Its disquieting presence undoubtedly evokes an unpleasant scenario. However, the same element has different implications depending on the set of circumstances to which it is related. When it appears in Casaria, the black cloud recalls frightening events that have been eventually overcome. The dismay that the black cloud carries with itself is still present in the lives of its inhabitants, but it now belongs to the past that will, hopefully, never come back. Now, they look confidently forward to a future that will leave behind the misery they had to suffer before arriving in Casaria. Conversely, when the black cloud manifests itself on the crowded beach, it assumes a different connotation; the connotation of a catastrophe that is about to befall the unsuspecting people that are blithely enjoying a summer day. CONCLUSIONS As I am writing this text, an epidemic is upsetting the lives of millions of people and the socio-political systems of entire countries – the whole of Italy has just been declared a red zone and all of its inhabitants have been put on lockdown. An invisible threat looms, suspending our daily habits. The regulations of the Italian government that have been put in place to tackle this health emergency say that people must avoid hugs, kisses, maintain one-metre distance from one another and are allowed to leave their houses only if they need to buy food and medicines. It seems that the neoliberal dismantling of social solidarity, desertification of common spaces and abolition of bodily encountering have finally found an unexpected ally in the pandemic. This apocalyptic scenario, which is uncontrollably overwhelming our lives and keeps expanding globally, powerfully reverberates in Casaria, as if the looming black cloud that appears in the film has eventually, violently, managed to break into our lives and is now unleashing all of its destructive force. Our only hope is that, once this nightmare is over, each of us will be able to find their own Casaria to rebuild their individual and social lives. 


    Felice Moramarco

  • Milan Mazúr’s artwork in the gallery points out the layers of the current culture of sharing both written and visual information, through which we convey our thoughts. The viewer can thus see certain elements referring to the web platform that is the source of inspiration not only for Milan Mazúr but also for many artists who, by surfing the Internet and appropriating ready-made images, form their own, often critical, view of society in the form of a visual expression balancing on the borderline of video, design or materialized matter of the virtual environment. In his exhibition, the artist is interested in the possibilities of video bending and mostly in examining the space in which the image is projected.

    Text: Lenka Sýkorová

  • The present-day consumerist aesthetic of our material culture is constantly tempting us with its captivating glow. Being both simultaneously glistening and plush, it is not unlike the surface of an intoxicating beverage. Nevertheless, beneath this surface we can often sense the contours of something menacing; it seems that what we are trying to hide under this enchanting veil could be the symptoms of a crisis.

    This spectre of our ever-consuming yet suppressed anxiety, which is constantly digesting the seemingly never-ending stream of pleasurable instigations. It is with this same impetus – reflecting today’s specific existential situation – that Michal Mazur reflects within his video and installation work.

    Mazúr’s non-linear fragmented narratives are built up from recycled and original visual and material stimuli that unmask the interlaced trap of our lives, where we are continually being torn between anxiety and gratification. It reveals us as prisoners in the constantly accelerating, systematic consumerism of late capitalism.

    Hotdock gallery, Bratislava - SK

    Viktor Čech

  • Liquid mother love

    Milan Mazúr, Ester Geislerová

    Kabinet T gallery, Zlín -CZ


    This exhibition marks a first collaboration of Czechoslovak visual artists Ester Geislerova and Milan Mazur (besides their recent director-actor joint experience in Ocuka, a short film by Milan starring Ester). The name of the exhibition, "Liquid Mother Love" could easily be read and interpreted as much literally as possible. Women dominate the videos; but despite this fact, the subject of womanhood or motherhood is rather a model or a metaphor for a broader interest of both artists. As shown in the book The Mother Love by Elisabeth Badinter, a French feminist author, the concept of an intouchable mother affection is actually a result of a social construct which continually changes its form. Women are not born to feel this mother affection, just as they are not biologically predetermined for a role of caring and sacrificing mother.

    What happens to the other social roles if we dare to decontruct the motherhood, considered one of the most sacred lifelong tasks of a whole half of all mankind? And what does happen to our understanding of other basic social roles, those that we accept forcefully or voluntarily, once we decide to attack, critically, their position of "undoubtful truths" of our lives? We can quickly realize that selfdetermination is a free choice, but we also feel that it can tear our life apart. 

    Questioning all what seems to be certain and reflecting on the the process of a world as we know it falling apart is central idea of the concept of "liquid modernity" as it was introduced by Polish-British sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. The authors of the exhibition themselves mention his work A Liquid Love as their reference. Individualised, market-driven and globalised society of the 21th century is, as Bauman states, everchanging; the simplicity of transgression brings nevertheless a risk of a world with blurred lines. 

    The vision of a human being in its pure animality is represented in a video where a human body is in direct touch with an anamorphic, ever-transforming, ever-fleeing slime material. Another presents a direct opposite to such vision, showing an emancipated woman scientist  giving a lecture. But, as the part shows, the fact that something is said from a teachers position does make this statement "undoubtful" or "pure truth" and that in fact there is no such thing as a "clear truth", therefore we can see the scientist also in moments of uncertainity and distraction. 

    The exhibition shows not only the videos, but also real objects - objects that take part in the films. They act both as weird props from the filmmaking process and as still-life representations of the videos. The artists also work with recent trends of virtual world which is in full accord with contemporary postinternet aesthetics: a home-made slime (a hit among youngest youtubers), instagram's cartoon face-filters, and also refer to the popular format of TED Talks - an easy, entertaining but also ephemerical internet educational tool. Entertainment and spectacle, two other powerful signs of today's world, are represented through a face of a star actor playing part in one of the videos. And lastly, beware: Foam sofas of the pink world of the last room are not as cozy as they appear. The feeling of uncertainty, one of the core subjects of the exhibition, can therefore be felt very directly. Just try to sit down.

     

    Terezie Nekvindová


PRESS