National Still Life

Synopsis

National Still Life is a photographic project exploring the construction of national identity through material culture, memory, and personal history. The work investigates how ideas of nationhood are encoded not only in political narratives but also in everyday objects, domestic environments, and sensory recollection. Drawing from childhood memory and lived experience, the project reflects on nostalgia as a complex psychological and cultural state rather than a simple sentiment. The images function as a quiet psychoanalytical enquiry into how national belonging is formed, sustained, and fragmented across time and migration. Rather than presenting identity as fixed or essentialised, the work approaches it as something shaped by displacement, hybridity, and the negotiation between inherited and chosen cultural markers. National Still Life situates photography as a site of cultural reflection, where personal history and collective symbolism converge within still, contemplative forms.

The series has been exhibited internationally, including solo shows at London Photomonth, Sofia Photomonth and at the Balassi Institute Istanbul (all 2016), as well as in group shows at the International Salon, Art Quarter and the FOLK Art Exhibition, Zipernowski Centre for Science and Art (both Budapest, 2015).