Joanna Piotrowska – Entre nous

Coming face to face with the work of young Polish artist Joanna Piotrowska, presented for the first time in France, inevitably calls up an experience of constraint. From these photographs and videos there emanates an atmosphere of confinement and muted violence. We see tensed-up bodies in artificial postures set in domestic interiors, shaky shelters cobbled together by adults inside their own homes, gestures toward off invisible enemies, but also zoo cages deserted by their occupants. What words cannot express, Piotrowska's deliberate, meticulously composed movements and poses turn into an unusual, body language, at once strange and disturbing.

Her reenactments of gestures in the family space function here as a mirror of society: potentially a locus of tenderness but also of control, of emancipation but also oppression. A host of systems of domination come together to the point of shaping body movements and relationships. Her first series, Frowst, begun in 2014, recreates an odd family album inspired by group therapy practices. These images of weirdly intertwined bodies whose dividing line between embrace and constraint is no longer so clear, drive home the ambiguity that pervades all her work.

When her gaze falls on zoo animal cages and enclosures, emptied of their inhabitants, and in particular the toys and objects used to "enrich" their lives in, an obvious parallel is drawn with the human domestic space, only further underlining the dichotomy at work between protection and oppression. Just as everything in her work seems to hinge on context, Piotrowska's latest series, premiering at LE BAL, takes a look at her own past, her own history. Coming upon the negatives of images taken by her father a few years before she was born, she developed a protocol using a telephoto lens to sample details from the found photographic material. The enlargements of objects seem to be the clues, the blurred markers, of her own failing memory.

In this exploration of intimacy, the human and social determinants of an era come together. Yet, while everything seems to be distancing us from a work of realism, is Joanna Piotrowska not creating what the philosopher and critic G. Lukács termed a "relative, incomplete image [...] of life itself, in an enhanced, intensified form, more alive than in reality"?

— Julie Héraut and Diane Dufour

« It is important for me to create such connections and move from animal to human, from human to house, from house to cage, from cage to shelter, safety, intimacy, touch.  »
– Joanna Piotrowska