The international photography center of Palermo, founded by Letizia Battaglia, hosts the first major Italian retrospective dedicated to the photographer and director Miron Zownir born in 1953 in Karlsruhe, Germany. Entitled Zeitwirdknapp / There is no more time – Retrospektive 1977-2019, collects more than seventy images taken mainly between New York, Berlin and Moscow.
His images often portray characters who live on the fringes of society: “Their life is so hard and brutal that it deserves my respect and attention. And then it is often ignored by the media and by most of the people, ”Zownir said in an interview.
The exhibition collects from the first shots that Zownir made in the seventies in the full explosion of the punk phenomenon in West Berlin and London, to the photographs of the American period of the eighties, in which he told the gay scene, the world of prostitution and drug addiction. ; up to those in Moscow, where the artist denounced the decline of the former Soviet Union.
“Miron Zownir has a very strong talent for theater. And his theater infiltrated his photographic research right from the start. The actors of his theater are the men, women, transsexuals, the disabled and the sick whom he met during his urban and suburban explorations, almost always managing to capture them in that moment in which they were willing to offer their being body, in a gesture of extreme efficacy and truth ”, wrote the curator of the exhibition Gaetano La Rosa.
The exhibition, supported by the Goethe-Institut Palermo, is accompanied by the volume Apotheosis and derision – The living theater of Miron Zownir, published by PogoBooks Berlin.
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