October 16, 2024
A new show at Philadelphia’s Institute of Contemporary Art exposes the vulnerability implicit in any physical encounter
Hands predominate in Joanna Piotrowska’s black-and-white photographs of staged human interactions: they caress, comfort, hold and protect, but they also grab and intrude and maybe even abuse. The tension in the Polish artist’s images stems from the ambiguous nature of the physical contact she portrays. The hand that tightly grasps a woman’s shoulder in Untitled (2014), for instance, could be passionate, consoling, possessive or violent. In this cramped closeup, we see only the woman’s jaw, thrust back, and a bulwark of body hair and skin pressed against her sternum. By withholding clarifying context, like facial expressions, Piotrowska exposes the vulnerability implicit in any physical encounter and encourages viewers to project their own meaning onto the image.
In this, her first solo exhibition in the United States, Piotrowska’s photographs from the last decade are presented in a custom-designed installation that enhances their claustrophobic unease. The chalky pink carpeting covering half of the floorspace eerily records visitors’ footprints and mimics the stifling cosiness of her photographed domestic interiors. By nesting two small rooms within the exhibition’s larger galleries, she creates intimate spaces and narrow, mazelike corridors that disorient and confine. Piotrowska’s exhibition design, which prevents viewers from taking in more than two or three images at a time, echoes her photographic strategies for revealing and concealing content. With two multimedia collages (both Untitled, 2024), she guides our eyes to the interplay of hands by replacing large sections of the prints, including an entire figure, with inlaid wood veneer. In Strokes (2022), an off-centre window similarly draws our attention to a trio of hands, while piquing our interest in what is not shown.