Joanna Piotrowska

In her staged photographs, Joanna Piotrowska focuses on human relationships and their bodily expression. She looks at characters entangled in the context of social institutions, struggling with manifestations of power, emotional dependencies and the violent elements of human nature. From these emanate an atmosphere of confinement and muted violence. We see shaky shelters cobbled together by adults inside their own homes, gestures towards invisible enemies, or zoo cages deserted by their occupants. Piotrowska's deliberate and meticulously composed movements turn into an unusual body language. Her black and white, handmade, silver gelatin prints evoke a record of performance rather than documentary representations of reality, in which the positioning of women and the psychology and politics of dissent, as well as the human impulse to control and dominate, are all called into question. As faces remain in the dark or beyond the frame, hidden from sight in most compositions, Piotrowska’s works challenge conventional photographic narratives of the family and the home, implying both the structural violence and instability experienced by women in patriarchal societies, as well as the possibility of rebellion.