Insiders ( 2013 - 2014 )

 

My series concerns the personal stories of people who have had near-death experiences. The photographs placed next to the portraits highlight a phase, a memento or a symbol taken from their stories. The subjective nature of the theme directed me to explain the unexplainable by creating a surreal atmosphere via the language of photography. The word-by-word quotations are equal in significance with the photographs, since they complement each other and create a comprehensive picture of the subject.

Before I turned 29, I was only vaguely concerned about death, but life forced me to face it directly. The time came in 2008 when I lost my mother. Until then she was a vital force in my life, feeding me with energy and protecting me. Moreover, it’s my life that I can thank her for. For a long time I didn’t know how to deal with the infinite emptiness and bottomless grief that she left behind. The fact that she had to leave our loving family made me angry and furious, but I had no choice. I had to allow room for mourning and begin to process the loss in order to be able to live my life. One era closed and I became an adult, while ceaselessly wondering about things that might have happened to her after she departed. I was thinking about a phenomenon which was one of the greatest yet least understood mysteries of humanity. It wasn’t an easy task. For a long time I couldn’t comprehend the fact that I won’t see my mother as a flesh and blood, living person. I might have been looking for the certainty that she is at a good place without pain and she still exists in her death. I wanted to believe that she can still see us and know about us. A legion of disturbing questions engulfed me and I had no answers.

The only way I believed would bring some breakthrough in dealing with my loss was to talk about death with people who were close to it or had experienced it in some way. The protagonists of my series were chosen irrespective of religious, existential or social affiliations. Their separate stories had many similarities: eternal love, a sense of peace, timelessness, meeting with relatives who had died earlier, a sense of a very strong but not blinding light and facing the consequences of their activities on Earth in an incredible way. Many of them felt their senses had reached perfection and were in the state of “infinite knowledge”. None of them wanted to come back from this element that seemed natural and familiar to them. Following recovery, their lives went through a radical change. Everything in their lives has been revalued and rearranged: their relations with others in quantity and quality, and their stand towards the material world and money. It became clear to them that in life nothing is more important than unrestricted love, forgiveness and knowledge.

 

 

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