Personal Space

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Combining the documentary method, staging, surreal film-like scenery and later digital manipulation and montage, I create subtly horrific images that extend beyond reality, revealing reality of our subconscious and our multiple, hybridizing, overlapping and growing emotions leaving us unable to recognize them as parts of ourselves. In order to present this emotional process - the one I consider inner and intimate - becoming larger than ourselves and estranged from us, I often use multiple layers of image, playing with human anatomy though postproduction, focusing on movement and using two types of lighting in my work. The dark background, from which the figures emerge, suggests intimacy, the personal life hidden from the public view. Complementary to it, the bright white light, similar to that in operating rooms, exposes the inner intimate life of our emotions to be dissected by others. In this dialectic relation of bodies as something visible, measurable, compact, solid as contrasted to emotions, as something invisible, (in)comprehensible, immeasurable, fluid, I build the semantics of my photographic series. Documentary method and staging are used to create a series of images that are revolving around the polysemy of a bathtub. At one hand, a bathtub is a private, warm place where one takes a breath after a chaotic day, while resting, protected from the ‘outer’ world. At the other hand, it is a place where one can deny breath, being violently drown, or committing a suicide. "Personal space" presents a double life, a Schrodinger situation of being and not being somewhere at the same time, of being at the upmost state of relaxation and of freezing fear.