Miron Zownir
24.07.2021 –
17.10.2021
london seven eight
Opening reception | 24 Juli | ab 16 Uhr
Miron Zownir’s London is strange and dark, but it isn’t cruel. In 1978 and 1980 his subjects still appear to have time and room to roam beyond the primacy of wage labour. The city is populated with laid-back old people, Berbers, various immigrant groups, and punks. It can still accommodate them all. The space that Zownir captured in his images is plentiful and vast. On their cemetery benches and in their grassy parks, their courtyards and cafés, the people who happen to cross the young photographer’s path seem at home. The darkness creeping into these open spaces seems to indicate that we are on the threshold to Thatcher’s neoliberal Great Britain.
These fifty-one photographs belong to the earliest works by this photographer, who in subsequent decades would become famous for his distinctively sensitive treatment of people who live on the edges of society in Berlin, New York, Moscow, Kyiv, and Bucharest. History is always written by the victors and it is their portraits that they carry with them out into the world to promote their views. Zownir and his camera merely happen to encounter the figures he captures, but he is also the one to salvage their image.
Mona Mur: Those Days Are Over
Spoken word performance with poems by Miron Zownir | 21:00
Text by Nico Anfuso
The album “Those Days Are Over” is a 2018 cross-media collaboration by two renowned artists: Singer, performer and composer Mona Mur transforms fifteen poems, written by “radical eye” photographer and author Miron Zownir, into deeply disturbing poetronica, revealing a cynical “outsider” perspective onto the many superficial surfaces of our existence.
Mona Mur, whose musical career began in the early 1980s, created a mysterious soundscape with the setting of Miron Zownir’s English-language poems, absorbing the idiosyncratic expressiveness of the poet with her mystic voice and her musical compositions enriched with powerful melancholy and provocative wildness.
Supported by the federal programme Neustart Kultur.