Marcello Faletra's Essay on Miron Zownir's Photography

Marcello Faletra has published a critical essay on the photography of Miron Zownir, coinciding with the retrospective exhibition "Zeitwirdknapp | Non c'è più tempo" curated by Gaetano La Rosa in Palermo. Zownir, born in Karlsruhe in 1953, has spent nearly half a century documenting marginal bodies in extreme situations, often in post-industrial settings. Faletra argues that Zownir's work operates through an "exploded syntax" where bodies are fetishized and exist beyond conventional time. The essay draws on philosophical references including Plato's Phaedo, Nietzsche's concept of transvaluation, and Barthes' distinction between studium and punctum. Faletra emphasizes that Zownir's photography is deliberately impious, collapsing distinctions between heaven, purgatory, and hell. The images function as social gestures that bypass aesthetic mediation, akin to the cutting eye in Buñuel's L'Âge d'Or. Faletra contrasts Zownir's subjects with Body Art practitioners like Gina Pane and Marina Abramović, noting that Zownir's subjects lack artistic pretense. The essay was published on Artribune in June 2021.