Reenchanting the Metropolis: Play, Divination, and the Photobook as Oracle - Masterclass with Máté Bartha on November 4, 2025

Join us on the masterclass with Máté Bartha on Tuesday, November 4, 2025. 

Photographer and filmmaker Máté Bartha will discuss three ongoing projects — The Secret Life of External Air-Conditioning Units, The Dice Man, and Anima Mundi — exploring how photography can reenchant urban space through systems of play, chance, and divination. Drawing from his DLA research at MOME on the photobook as an oracle-like object, Bartha presents a practice that merges documentary methods with symbolic interpretation. His works approach the metropolis as an allegorical field, where everyday forms, memories, and coincidences reveal hidden orders and the possibility of a renewed sense of wonder.  

Máté Bartha (1987) is a Budapest-based visual artist working in the fields of  photography and documentary film. His practice is driven by a mission to reenchant the world through world-building, impersonation and constructing personal and collective mythologies. His work proposes new narratives by blending symbolic and subjective interpretations of his usual field of observation, the metropolis, treating urban spaces as arenas for imaginative transformation. Bartha’s works have been published and exhibited widely, and often combine staged and documentary imagery, archival material, and speculative narrative forms. Bartha holds Master's degrees in Photography (Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design, 2011) and Documentary Filmmaking (University of Theatre and Film Arts, 2016), and is currently a doctoral student at MOME. His first photobook, Common Nature (2014), explored the ambivalence of urban space as a mirror of the unconscious. Kontakt (2018), a coming-of-age portrait of Hungarian military youth camps, was awarded the Louis Roederer Discovery Award at the Rencontres d’Arles (2019). His recent project Anima Mundi, a fictional urban encyclopedia of cosmic order, received the Main Jury Prize at Les Boutographies, Montpellier (2024). His ongoing work, The Dice Man, is a chance-based photographic pilgrimage through grief, memory, and city space.

The lecture will be organized on Tuesday, November 4, 2025 at 17.40 in tiered room D-001. 

Please note that external guests need to register for events. If you are an external guest, please send an email to vsp@ceu.edu. We will request a visitor card for you, which you can pick up from the reception desk upon your arrival.