Personal Space
Personal space – the zone, invisible to others but of great importance to us, where we are most often alone with ourselves and our emotions. It is up to us how far we allow ourselves to get into it. Where does the boundary lie? The photographs presented at the exhibition will allow you to enter my personal space, the space of feelings, observations, thoughts and reflections. Let it be an experience of sorts, which will trigger interactions between me – the author of the photographs, the photographs and you – the viewers.
I invite you to a special place. A place where time is of the utmost importance, but where time is also governed by its own laws. A place of remembrance and forgetting. A place where each of us will eventually find ourselves – a cemetery.
I will always associate the cemetery with my grandmother, who used to take me to the graves of loved ones. She led me along the same path, telling very often the same family stories. She nurtured in me the memory of loved ones. To this day, when I visit the cemetery, I follow my grandmother’s signposts and try to see the different stories. Sometimes what I see is a testament to living memory and sometimes it is a story of forgetting. In the end, nothing can protect itself from the passing of time anyway. Stone tombstones, crosses, plastic figurines of saints and even portraits made on porcelain, advertised as “everlasting”.
A cemetery is a very personal place. This is where we come to bury our loved ones with dignity and to experience this often difficult moment with tears in our eyes. Here we light a candle as a sign of remembrance. Here we pray for a better future for our departed loved ones and here we see our end.
The exhibition shows my emotional relationship to history and memory. Through photography I only pause time. I am not able to stop it forever. I would like, through my photographs, to make you reflect on the passing of time, on the inevitable passage of time.
