Joanna Piotrowska

Joanna Piotrowska’s photographs examine domesticity in abstracted depictions of intimacy. Bodies — of siblings, lovers — share contact with each other and their surroundings in affected poses of mutual support and constraint that communicate an ambivalence towards their interior arrangements and the nearness of their familial bonds. The contorted gestures of trust between Piotrowska and her subjects, and their environments and cohabitants are so palpable as to induce a vicarious sensation of vulnerability. Lurking behind these vignettes of home life is a vague atmosphere of resignation: to power dynamics, discomfort, dysfunction. Piotrowska’s photographs beckon viewers to see themselves in her subjects’ apathetic acceptance of private malaise as a meta-phor for more sinister socio-political problems.