Joanna Piotrowska & Formafantasma at Phillida Reid
In 2015, Joanna Piotrowska was photographing in Nagorno-Karabakh, a disputed territory inside Azerbaijan, when she was apprehended by native police. Accused of spying for Russia, Piotrowska was subjected to intensive questioning that culminated in her interrogators’ demand that she proceed her work to show her innocence. Confronted with the prospect of perpetual surveillance, Piotrowska turned her consideration to roses, “the one protected topic,” as she’d later clarify. In a single print, a part of the expansive set up Sub Rosa, 2022, a hand delicately cups a darkish rose, a barely stiff but light gesture that evokes the artist’s better-known portraits. However the majority of the pictures produced are brooding, tenebrous prints that resemble Dutch nonetheless lifes.
In collaboration with the design studio Formafantasma, Piotrowska designed metal “anti-frame” units to encase her pictures. Sub Rosa, the ensuing site-specific set up, first exhibited at ARCH Athens and now at Phillida Reid in London, restrains reasonably than frames the photographs. Piotrowska’s pictures are, at varied factors, encased in an nearly comically massive metal matte, mounted to the ground with industrial clasps, and bolted to a glass panel that juts out of the wall like a waypost. In an adjoining room, a protracted strip of metal traces the perimeter of the area, bisecting the doorframes and pinning down the tops of a number of massive prints, which curl barely upward on the unanchored edges.
Piotrowska’s alternative of topic was itself a subversive act, albeit one explicitly meant to painting her work as apolitical to her interlocutor. Certainly, the exhibition’s title, Latin for “underneath the rose,” indicators the artist’s makes an attempt to undercut current energy constructions. Her resolution to {photograph} roses, a permanent image of socialist and antiauthoritarian causes, is a resonant one. Underneath her cautious hand, the flowers turn out to be indexes of trauma, indicators of resistance and resilience in a area nonetheless fractured by the aftershocks of the Soviet Union’s collapse.
