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Viktor Kopasz was born in 1973 in Kráľovský Chlmec (Királyhelmec), an ethnically Hungarian region in the Southeast corner of Slovakia. In 1988, he started his studies of photography at the School of Applied Arts in Košice and then moved to Prague, where he attended FAMU (Prague Film and Television Academy, Department of Photography) from 1992 – 1997. Historically connected to the fate of three national communities and cultures, the topic of homeland and mixed identities are themes that can often be found in his work. Kopasz currently lives and works in Prague, where he also teaches Photography at the School of Graphic Design.
Since Kopasz graduated from the Department of Photography at Prague’s FAMU in 1997, he has pursued a path that presents a seminal dialogue not only with the possibilities of photography, but with visual expression as such – a clear vital need for the artist. In his series Temporary Objects we can observe a change in the perception of sequences outside of the temporal one. The object, which we perceive here in the context of the image as a prototype, is figurally present in all its copies and replicas. The concepts that form causality are inverted here, and it disrupts how our minds usually work to anchor and bind abstract concepts and their equivalents as objects. It could be viewed in the context of one aspect of human-computer interaction – an oscillation between illusory and interactive sequences, which forces the user to switch between different ways of thinking, between different cognitive activities. And it is this aspect that emphasizes the role of something that we call multitasking. A certain straddling of the media and their forms, or horizontal and vertical switching between different levels of references is typical of Viktor Kopasz. Creating sketches and inspirational models sometimes leads to a complete abandonment of the original idea and with a redirected focus on the newly created material.
His work was shown at Post History, curated by Barnabás Bencsik, OFF Biennale Budapest,), 2015, at Imaginary maggots in collaboration with Marek Meduna, 2016, at Konstruktivní lyrika, Galéria Medium, Bratislava, Slovakia 2018, at Prolonged Identity, curated by Jiří Ptáček, Fotograf Gallery, Prague, 2018, and at Paperlust Photobook Fest, Krakow, 2019. Most recently he had a solo exhibition loose structures at Galerie Smečky in Prague and his artist book Temporary objects was published by Artmap in December 2023.