Urbanistan: on the edge of urban chaos

Slovenian photographer and traveller Matjaž Krivic, whose work has won several prestigious awards, shows us his photographic project Urbanistan.
A word, Urbanistan, that has something fascinating about it, evoking distant lands and magical places. In actual fact Matjaž Krivic photographs places that are exotic for us, from Afghanistan to Mali, from Mongolia to India, immortalising with his lens not a glossy overview but human beings in the centre of their architectural and urban context. The people he portrays are not just putting in an appearance to enhance the spectacular architecture, such as Tibetan monasteries or Mali raw earth buildings, but are identified as the true fulcrum of the photographic composition. 
Urban architecture photographer Matjaž Krivic therefore stands on the side of the people who struggle, with great strength and dignity, to survive every day in places that are as hostile as they are picturesque, because of climate, armed conflict or poverty. Matjaž Krivic shows us moments of play, prayer, ritual, social life: moments of cohesive force capable of building our faith in the future. Urbanistan is for all intents and purposes a visual story of difficult situations surrounded by spectacular buildings, not limited to pure reporting, as these urban photographs offer a cross section of life in places that remain to be explored. 
Matjaž Krivic reveals through his empathy and his photographs what curator Boštjan Videmšek calls “a story of the quiet loudness on the margins of total existential, religious, economic and geopolitical chaos”.

Christiane Bürklein (@chrisbuerklein)

Matjaž Krivic
http://www.krivic.com/