Fotograf Magazine

Viktor Kopasz has been creating original photographic books that serve
as a framework for his thinking and expression and a space for original
exploration, completion, and manipulation of photographs accompanied
with textual records, notes, and drawings. The Prolonged Identity exhibition
frees his photographs from the traditional book format. It is based on the
author’s methods he has used in recent years, and leaves the book form
even more dramatically. The only thing that remains is the discrete context
created by large objects placed in the gallery space that can remotely
refer to ancient scrolls or prayer wheels (mani khorlo) and that invite the
viewer to interactivity, like books. The photographs on the rotating wheels
complement the classically adjusted pictures in frames on the gallery walls,
marking out the interpretation planes in relation to the three ethnic cultures
important to the author.

In the exhibition, Kopasz explores the boundaries of his identity. After
many years of living in the Czech Republic, he relates to his Hungarian
roots and growing up in Slovakia. He’s playing with the viewer’s attention,
offering multi-layered visual keys, finding new contexts by manipulation. The
significant theme of the exhibition are photographs of statues of horses
without historical figures. They offer a new kind of perception and a very
impressive perspective of a relationship to both personal and national history.

Sylva Francová