Post

Marta Zgierska is one of the most prominent Polish photographers of the youngest generation. The series Post, shown for the first time in Poland, was honored with the prestigious Prix HSBC pour la Photographie and has traveled as an exhibition to the finest photography galleries in Europe and the United States. These minimalist images are inspired by events from the artist’s life. During the preparations for the Post exhibition, the artist began working on a series of photographs titled Numbness, featuring plaster casts of faces. Both cycles presented at the Fort Institute of Photography Gallery are an attempt to translate emotional states – anxiety, pain, the need for closeness -into the language of images, and a reflection on experience and memory. It is a form of self-portraiture in which we see the artist’s face and her life only indirectly, captured in objects and compositions. The strength of the Post and Numbness series, as noted by critics, also lies in their interaction with the viewer, who, as if in a mirror, recognizes themselves and their own obsessions within the images.

Post

In 2013, I survived a serious car accident. I was close to death, and reality – one that I had been adapting to with difficulty – slipped through my fingers. This misfortune brought about another: surgeries, months of physical limitations, a breakup, and the return and aggravation of anxiety neurosis. Not long before the accident, I had found in my family home a teacher’s descriptive feedback from the time I was a seven-year-old, exemplary student. I am still one in my adult life. However, despite the opinion of others, my limitations, shame and anxiety are still teeming inside me. I started taking the first photographs as a way of incantation of fear in an aesthetic image. The accident brought my work to a halt. My mind was filling up with fragmentary memories, and sharp, detached details. My own physicality and pain became a source of images that felt more and more substantial and bodily as time passed. “Post” is a project about trauma, frozen in dead greyness, silence and tension. Everyone can find their own punctures here – exhausting dreams, fears, obsessions. An individual way of discovering a twin traumatic memory in another person, “Post” is an attempt at intimate contact which closes the past non-experience in the present.

Numbness

Each event, fear or emotion leaves a mark on our bodies – a momentary grimace, the increasing deepening of wrinkles, or a sudden and unexpected interference, when a particular experience can damage a personality constructed over many years. Imprinting an elusive moment reveals tiny scars left by our experiences. The indirect form of casts shows that we never reach the final form; our bodies change with each passing second. I live with constructed versions of “me”. I marvel at them, I temper successive images, I caress incarnations; I ask the question: who am I? I take advantage of the space between affecting my physicality, photographic portrait and sculpture. The face is a place where a person’s subjectivity is focused. Its deformation and distortion poses a threat to the integrity of the individual.

All photographs shown at the exhibition are available for sale. The full presentation, including dimensions, editions, techniques and prices, can be viewed and downloaded here

For more information please contact us: biuro@fiff.org.pl