The skin is a seriously underestimated communication organ. Constantly busy with haptic information, with cotton fabrics and plastic keyboards, with breathing and allergies, temperature and perspiration, the largest human organ also continuously sends descriptions of the mental state to the outside world. She blanches and blushes, appears tanned or pimply, folded or botoxed, and in every mine game she is the canvas on which the acute mood is modeled. For this ubiquity in human mediation, the epidermis is surprisingly rare in art as an object of interest. Museum rule number one, “Don’t touch,” says clearly how the cognitive medium of skin falls far behind seeing, hearing, even smelling when it comes to presence in art.
Therefore, entering an exhibition space that is completely skin-colored creates an almost eerie atmosphere. Joanna Piotrowska’s presentation design at the Kestnergesellschaft Hannover paints the walls and ceiling, curtains and carpeting with the hue of nude painting, as if the Kunsthaus were a being with an inward sensibility. And in this somewhat claustrophobic ambience, which also allows for the amoeba-like association of being suffocated by the surrounding skin, the Polish photographer stages her pictures and films, which are mostly about touch. However, not in the primarily erotic sense.
Many of the images shown here of strange closeness and odd intimacy are also currently on view at the Venice Biennale, where Piotrowska’s quiet observations in the main exhibition “The Milk of Dreams” at the Arsenale are somewhat inconspicuously lost between much more garish positions. In the rooms of the Kestnergesellschaft, the same motifs suddenly appear intensely spooky and irritating due to their imprisonment in a cell made of skin. The double portrait of a woman with a man’s arm, one side grasping her bosom with a strange finger spread, the other half putting the index finger to her lips in a command of silence, may tell a story of abuse, but perhaps also represent a game of infatuation, for what the woman’s ease speaks.
Portraits suspended between play and violence, threat and agreement
Such double portraits of enigmatic situations make up the main part of the exhibition entitled “Sleeping Throat, Bitter Thirst”. A young man pushes another man onto a mattress as in a role-playing game of unknown rules. A girl at a pond presses her foot between the legs of a second girl on the ground. A finger touches a head from behind under the ear, which is covered by a stocking mask in the subsequent image section. All of these portraits remain suspended between play and violence, menace and consent. And due to the character of a documentary photograph, which is consistently kept in black and white, these staged situations convey the absurd like a concrete narrative about people and the secrets of their relationships.
Role-playing game with unknown rules.
(Photo: Courtesy of Southard Reid/Courtesy of Southard Reid)
The second strand of motifs pursued by Piotrowska is devoted to contortions and incomprehensible gestures. A woman, pressed in a corner of the sofa, ties her arms behind her head, girls in poor apartment facilities freeze in movements between gymnastics and self-defence. And in two film loops, which are projected onto the walls by clattering ancient projectors, young girls show frozen poses that may have come from an expressive ballet, or they perform silent self-touches that could also be a child’s secret language.
After all, the young Polish artist based in London, who has become a sought-after artist with major museum exhibitions all over the world in recent years, stages shelters for her photographs. Inspired by the makeshift constructions made of cardboard and shopping trolleys that the homeless use to build temporary shelters in urban spaces, Piotrowska builds indoor huts made of books and pieces of furniture in which decently dressed adults hide. These motifs also suggest the contingent of everyday threats in an insecure society, but, as in the touch pictures, transfer it into a strange situation that allows her pictures to be viewed as grotesque theater.
All of these image offerings, which depict situations of latent vulnerability as moments with an open ending, without any shock effect, show skin as a territory of conflict. The transitional zone between the perceived inner and outer world, which Piotrowska also shows in close-ups of naked body details, is the stage for a sensitive uneasiness about bodily integrity. A surface with great depth and effect that shows how ambiguous this medium of touch can be interpreted. And that undoubtedly gets under the skin.
Joanna Piotrowska: “Sleeping Throat, Bitter Thirst”, Kestner Society Hanover, until September 25, 2022.