Joanna Piotrowska by Jonah Goldman Kay
By Jonah Goldman Kay for BOMB Magazine
November 13, 2024
I first encountered Joanna Piotrowska’s work at the 2022 Venice Biennale, where her tense and unsettling scenes of domestic life haunted a wide wall of the Arsenale. In Piotrowska’s photographs, the assumed safety of the home is inverted: children’s forts become nightmarish assemblies of belongings, and couples grasp each other in positions that oscillate between caring and violent. By carefully choreographing the movements of her subjects, she reveals the unspoken hierarchies that govern our most intimate interactions. In our discussions, she situated her practice at the nexus of performance and photography. Her images are also distorted takes on the art-historical tradition of the domestic portrait.
Piotrowska’s subjects exist in relation to each other as well as their environs. We seek out symbolism in the objects that surround them, hoping to glean insight into their peculiar poses. At the same time, many of her photographs are flooded with the white light of a bright flash, suggesting the photographer is an intruder who has stumbled upon this tableau. Questions of power and authority, intimacy and control percolate. Piotrowska’s images thrive in this unsettling limbo, revealing the disquieting structures that govern domestic life. In tandem with her first institutional exhibition in the United States at the Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA) in Philadelphia, Piotrowska spoke with me about her process, her sources, and her newfound love of Porto in Portugal.
Jonah Goldman Kay
Many of your photographs have an almost documentary quality to them. How do you see your work in relation to this photographic tradition?
Joanna Piotrowska
This is an interesting question because documentary is a broad term that can be interpreted in different ways. Most of my work is documentary in that I am documenting a performance I have arranged for the camera. All of my images are highly staged. I believe the act of staging or performing can have a powerful effect on the viewer, be it in film, theater, or a photograph. My earliest inspirations in photography were documents of performances, such as the black-and-white photographs of performances by Joseph Beuys or Allan Kaprow. They freeze one moment of a longer action, thereby abstracting it and making the photograph even more surreal.