‘A moment of darkness at noon’ is Joanna Piotrowska’s first exhibition in Scotland. It includes a series of newly commissioned, large format photographic works, photographic collage and framing devices created in response to the gallery space.
Piotrowska utilises photography, performance and film to examine the human condition. Her psychologically charged compositions often take place in domestic spaces and constructed environments. These ‘social landscapes’ probe unconscious actions and behavioural responses, addressing the dynamics of familial relations to explore personal expression, childhood memory, and practices of intimacy.
‘A moment of darkness at noon’ continues Piotrowska’s extended investigations into her own and others’ unconscious through Jungian psychoanalysis, with a particular focus on intuitive and pre-verbal forms of expression. Her layered collages, including images from the artist’s own family archive, draw inspiration from fragmentary memories and dream states. Nudes, landscapes, scaled-up rock forms, and tightly cropped faces cohere in an ambiguous and hallucinatory space of possibility. Together, these elements map an uncertain territory that exists in a space between memory, dream, and the unconscious.
According to Jungian psychology, this process resonates with ‘individuation’, a confrontation between the conscious self and deeper layers of the psyche. As such, Piotrowska’s collages function as evocative constellations emerging from the personal unconscious, where past experiences and emotional residues coexist without hierarchy. For Piotrowska, these fragments are activated through the intensity of midlife transition, a moment of psychic reorientation that prompts reflections on identity, personal history, and what has been forgotten or repressed.
About the artist
Joanna Piotrowska (b. 1985, Warsaw, Poland) lives and works in Porto, Portugal. She studied Photography at the Royal College of Art in London and Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków.
Recent solo exhibitions include ‘unseeing eyes, restless bodies’, ICA Philadelphia, USA (2024); ‘Entre nous’, LE BAL, Paris, France (2023); ‘Sub Rosa’, with Formafantasma, Phillida Reid, London; ‘Dreams Are The Facts From Which We Must Proceed’, Galeria Kaufhof, Urbane Kunste Ruhr, Witten, Germany (2023); ‘Sleeping Throat, Bitter Thirst’, Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover, Germany (2022); ‘FROWST’, Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, Poland (2020); ‘Stable Vices’, Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland; ‘All Our False Devices’, Tate Britain, London (2019). Piotrowska’s work was included in ‘The Milk of Dreams’ at the Venice Biennale 2022 and ‘manifesto of fragility’, 16th Lyon Biennale 2022.
