Portraits
1997 - 2024

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Portraits in Time

Portraits is a photographic series that Ana Opalić shot over a long period of time (at this
exhibition, the interval from 1997 to the present day) that has to be taken as work in
progress or even as a lifetime project. There is the continued process of the artist positioning
herself and communicating with the world and the people that surround her, of the “capture”
of man in the time that shapes, models and changes us. Since the artist photographs people
close to her, family members and friends, this is an intimate act, a recapitulation of relations,
communication that she establishes with her other gaze, with the revealing lens of the
camera...

... As in all her photographic series Ana Opalić insists on a deeper look, even when it is inevitable that she is going to capture the disappearance or reversal of things that once looked strong and stable. All the time engaged, as she puts it, with the categories of staying and disappearing, going back to the same spatial points that she problematises in other
photographic series that are work in progress, once again taking pictures of the same people, the artist comes to grips with the brittleness of formed ideas, whether one’s own or other people’s, and with the fragility of the very world that surrounds us and that we construct each day. Portraits captured in time are also the portraits of time itself, that invisible, omnipresent and unavoidable actor.

Rozana Vojvoda, 2020. (excerpts from the text published in the exhibition catalogue)