KARTOON SERIES

Year: 2024
Medium & Technique: Studio photography with recycled cardboard constructions / No digital post-production
Artists: Michal Zahornacký & Aneta Hrenák
Exhibition: FOTOGRÁFICA BOGOTÁ, Centro Nacional de las Artes (CNA), Bogotá (upcoming, 2025)

In KARTOON, the human body becomes a site of transformation. Stripped of individuality, it reappears as a new, imagined form — built from recycled cardboard, a material once meant to disappear, physically shaped and photographed as a real construction rather than a digital illusion. In a world saturated with images and waste, these figures question what remains of the human once everything becomes recyclable — even identity itself. What was discarded becomes a body again: fragile, temporary, yet insistently present.

These figures speak about the age we live in — a time when identities are reshaped, packaged, and re-used, when surfaces often outlive what they cover. Cardboard, a humble skin of our consumer world, becomes here a second flesh: protective, absurd, and unexpectedly beautiful.

Behind each silhouette lies a person, but also a reflection of something larger — how we reconstruct ourselves from what remains, how fiction can be a form of survival. KARTOON moves between play and meditation, suggesting that both humans and materials share the same destiny: to be broken down, repurposed, and continually reborn in new forms.