Untitled

2015 - Photography (Photography)

51 x 41 cm

Joanna Piotrowska

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This selection of photographs taken between 2014 and 2019 focus on Piotrowska’s long-term preoccupation with issues of domesticity and containment. The images depict young isolated women in domestic environments, holding various unnatural postures: we see a hand raised to a face, as if in a trance; limbs precariously balanced or ambiguously entangled, contorted against an unseen adversary. It is unclear whether gestures are benign or threatening, whether these women are menacing or being menaced. These photographs are inspired by illustrated self-defense manuals and the work of feminist and psychologist Carol Gilligan. Piotrowska appropriates the formulaic step-by-step approach of the manuals but instead of showing two people in contact, she photographs the (re)actions of one woman in conflict with an unknown, absent subject. Gilligan’s research for its part revealed a tendency in adolescent girls to silence their inner voice to comply with the structures of patriarchal society, Piotrowska seeks to (re)present their agency in corporeal form, and depicts – through the invisible opponent – the underlying pressures they have to confront.

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Photographer and filmmaker Joanna Piotrowska explores issues such as the female condition, family dynamics, and post-Soviet Poland, through black and white images that depict the quotidian. Her work investigates the symbolic and invisible power structures that constrain personal behaviors, singling out how culture, politics, and history impact each person’s intimate and emotional life. Documenting gestures of care, self protection, or control, Piotrowska’s images render these daily scenes uncanny through attentive composition. Piotrowska does not consider her photographs to be documentary but rather sees them as performances, where the characters’ poses, facial expressions and movements are carefully directed.

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Colors:

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• mind.n.01
• subjectivity.n.01
• gender.n.01
• domestic.n.01
• family.n.01
• composition.n.01