For his 70th birthday exhibition, Jaroslav Kučera, the preeminent exponent of Czech life photography today, has come up with a project that surprisingly does not focus on his famous ‘people on the margin of society’, but on the apparently banal material objects that surround us. And what they tell us about our world is just as powerful as when the lens is trained on actual human beings – in fact often even more so. Especially when the photographer presents his images in masterfully juxtaposed pairs that elicit in us a thrilling sense of the mysterious – an awareness of the hidden beauty in our human world. The result is a kind of magic ‘surbanalism’, a journey of discovery through the most ordinary of everyday objects.