Máté Bartha – Anima Mundi

A big city turns almost everyone into a photographer at some point. Some stick to taking cute snapshots with their smartphones, others embark on a serious photographic journey, and some… Well, some take this flâneur game to another level.

Máté Bartha has brought to life a fictional observer who tirelessly wanders through the metropolis in search of patterns, hidden connections, and the elusive „order of things”. Photographs from various global locations are collaged into an unidentifiable, virtual cityscape – almost like on a detective’s board, where pieces are put together in an effort to figure out the unknown.

Designed as an obscure encyclopaedia, Anima Mundi echoes Gombrowicz’s Cosmos and its reflections on human attempts to find structure and meaning in an often arbitrary world.

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» GET TO KNOW THE ARTIST «

Based in Budapest, Máté Bartha works across photography and documentary film. Interested in theory-fiction, he observes the metropolis in a playful way that involves impersonation and world building. 

Bartha self-published his first photobook, Common Nature, in 2014. Since then, his series have garnered numerous awards, including the Louis Roederer Discovery Award at Rencontres d’Arles (2019) for Kontakt, and the main jury prize at Les Boutographies, Montpellier (2024) for Anima Mundi, recently presented in Łódź.