Robert Hutinski - Atavism - 2013

Robert Hutinski milks the ethereal substance of memories from the raw material of half-torn images found in his town’s archives, crafting a tale of remembrance and disappearence.

Priests, doctors, soldiers, tavern regulars, sleeping beauties inhabit a map which key is lost forever once the caption accompanying them is gone.
Atavism traces the contours of a map of collective memory, where the actors gradually disappear leaving no trace behind but the places they used to live in.

A lyric exploration of human consciousness where the faulty path from recollection to memory takes place, an arbitrary and contingent process which transform experience into history. Some moments are saved, some other drown. Recollections inescapably fade away, leaving behind a flotsam of images beyond interpretation, silent as sphynxes, drifting until the day they disappear in the whirlpool of time.

What is in the photos is what I think I see.

To observe – To document – To communicate – To warn – To take a stand.
Today, the political permeates most practices in the everyday of an individual who both executes and produces them and only rarely (in most cases) questions and examines their origin. The complex array of topics pertaining to the notion of the political affect the individual from cradle to tomb without (in most cases) the individual’s awareness thereof. All these practices and ideas which are in constant conflict are translated and assimilated via various fields into the individual’s everyday. One such field is photography whose very power lies in being politically incorrect in practice. Only thus can it be morally and ethically pure – a factor of reflection and promotion of awareness.
I was born in 1969, Celje; this is where I live. I have held several solo and group exhibitions at home and abroad.

Robert Hutinski