Ana Zibelnik (b. 1995, Ljubljana) is a photographer currently living and working in The Netherlands. After graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana, she decided to further pursue her studies in film and photographic theory at Leiden University. During the period between 2015 and 2018 she was part of the If Slovenia Were project, an intense mentorship programme led by Klavdij Sluban. In May 2018, she was selected as an emerging artist to participate in the second cycle of PARALLEL - European Photo Based Platform. She has been dealing extensively with the topics of death and time consciousness in photography, often incorporating literary works into her practice. Following her thesis project, she self-published a book “As if you could kill time without injuring eternity…” where her photographs are presented in dialogue with the lines of Vladimir Nabokov.
Over the past months we showcased the finalists and winners of Verzasca Foto Festival Awards 2019. Verzasca Foto is a photography festival taking place in the small village of Sonogno Val Verzasca, located in the Swiss Alps, from 5th to 8th September 2019.
Here it is "We are the ones turning" by Ana Zibelnik first prize of the award:
The series is a reflection on something we all grapple with: dying. To make sense of what is constantly there – somewhere, sometimes latent, sometimes not so much –, to better understand and bear the "possibility of impossibility" we tend to listen to those more experienced, similarly or more troubled than us. We read books and watch films and lend an ear to the occasional wise man speaking. My own idea of how we encounter the constant presence of death is greatly indebted to some of those who examined the infinitely compelling and defining nature of mortality in detail and put it down in ink. One of those who marks the conceptual backbone of my series is Martin Heidegger, who accurately noted that the paramount difference between man and everything else that lives, lies not in the ratio, but in mortality: “mortals are those who experience death as death". In this sense, human beings are identified by the great absence. Not necessarily by fear of it or permanent anticipation, but by mere awareness of the fact – an awareness we are born with and is reinforced and revisited simply by living.
My series is an exploration into the subtle encounters with death during lifetime. I wish to construe a vast and intense fictional narrative that zooms in on what it means to be running out of time.
