What do the photographer’s deadpan images of adults in dens and women in self-defence poses say about modern family life? That we’re insecure, tense and nervous
On graduating in 2013, Joanna Piotrowska already seemed fully formed as an artist. For her diploma show at London’s Royal College of Art, she presented a series of large-format, black-and-white photographs titled Frowst – meaning stuffy or stifling – that are quietly unsettling. People in domestic settings are positioned touching or holding one another: small groups at once intimate and weirdly disengaged. Uncanny, deadpan expressions quash the idea that these photographs might document actual events, yet the subjects’ physical ease with one another seems real.
“I was concerned with relationships between family members – how they can be uncomfortable, oppressive, unhealthy and dependent,” says Piotrowska. Posed using real families, her works distil the off-kilter claustrophobia of a Yorgos Lanthimos movie into a single frame. Last year, a handful of her Frowst works were shown at MoMA in New York. This week, All Our False Devices, a solo display of more recent photographs and films, opens at Tate Britain.
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