Self-Portrait
In Self-Portrait (2008–2013), Jun Ahn places her body on the edges of skyscrapers to photograph the instant when the present slips between past and future. The gesture began on her New York rooftop: the distant skyline suggested an unreachable future, while the surface beneath her feet felt like an unchangeable past. Sitting above the void, she captured her dangling legs to embody this “gap-like moment.” Her work has since explored gravity and the feeling of free fall as a metaphor for living. In 2020, the loss of her grandmother during the pandemic deepened this enquiry. For Images Gibellina, the project was conceived as a site-specific installation across three different exhibition spaces, unfolding as a spatial and emotional journey where mourning becomes a fragile threshold between presence and disappearance.
Self-Portrait
In the Self-Portrait series, Jun Ahn photographed herself in extreme situations, perched hundreds of meters above a void, on a window sill, atop a skyscraper or a staircase. Without any special effects, these self-portraits explore the notions of space in large cities as well as self-representation on social networks, and the limitations of the selfie. The exhibition comprised a scenography specifically elaborated for a bedroom at the Hôtel des Trois Couronnes, as well as an installation in the hotel’s lobby that played with the sense of dizziness her images generate.
