Michał Korta. Balkan playground

The Balkans – a world on the edge of Europe – are composed of many different, often contradictory cultural and civilizational experiences. The Balkans are pre‑modern and post‑modern. They are at once an image of the European Middle Ages and of a post‑civilizational apocalypse. The Balkans are innocent and rotten. They are never one thing alone. In Michał Korta’s photographs there is nothing of the colonial, nothing of western orientalism, no creation of an exotica or awe of the wild colour of the Balkans. He photographs what he sees, with a kind of understanding experience. His image is very reminiscent of Stasiuk’s Taksim; the same type of respect for a dying, departing world of the time of transformation and globalization.