A caress which we do not know if it is constrained or embraced. A gesture that could signal or perhaps tries to protect. A hand, a shelter, a shadow… The bodies photographed by Joanna Piotrowska are under tension. An impalpable tension, but disconcerting. Over the course of his images, the servant turns strange, the body becomes alert and resistant.
Trained at the Royal College of Art in London after a stint at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, the 38-year-old Polish photographer seems to be the invisible puppeteer of those who serve as her models. Seized in the mirror of its black and white, they lend themselves to a dance of silence. By details, three times nothing, a position, a look, they worry. Everyday strangers, breaking into their own homes.
Through the prisms of economics, philosophy and phenomenology, the domestic universe becomes a complex microcosm rich in meaning. “Politics and history are nested not only in the architecture of the home, in its carpets, its furniture, its objects, but also in family relationships and their hierarchies, everyday gestures, she confided, in 2020, to the digital magazine ART news. I love looking at these interiors and presenting them in an unexpected context. »
An “antispectacular strategy”
Joanna Piotrowska is inspired by different types of psychotherapies and nourishes them with various influences. The cinema, of course, that she “consumes as others consume water”. The choreography, of course: she must have watched the Roses in Roses (1997), by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. It will come as no surprise to discover his stagings as limpid and mathematical as a Bach fugue, with this coldness of beings which hides troubling secrets.
“Joanna Piotrowska creates images that make us think about the omnipresence and ambiguity of power structures. » Joanna Bednarek, philosopher
She also likes the metaphysical paintings of Giorgio De Chirico, the writings of Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Alberto Moravia. In short, everything that relates to the struggle of bodies against influence, whether family, psychic, state… She captures the detail, the harshness. “Joanna Piotrowska deploys an anti-spectacular strategy, describes the philosopher Joanna Bednarek, specialist in the links between feminism and capitalism, in the monograph devoted to the artist, Stable Vices (2021), published by Mack. She creates images that make us think about the pervasiveness and ambiguity of power structures, instead of showing us power itself in all its violent glory. »
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