Don’t ask about Poland: Mysterious Deviation
“Don’t ask about Poland: Mysterious Deviation” is an ongoing photographic project exploring memory, nostalgia and the shifting relationship between personal history and place.
I was born in Poland and in the early 2000s I emigrated to the United Kingdom. Today my connection to the country is complex: I return regularly, yet I feel increasingly distant from the reality of contemporary Poland.
Each time I visit my hometown, I photograph my friends, their families, and still lives which surround them. I move freely between portraits and objects which coexist within the project and are forming visual connections between people and their environments.
These photographs are pockets of memory, fragments of my childhood and adolescence, existing somewhere between past and present. Because of the distance created by emigration I am here leaving objective reality behind, and I am entering the uncertain territory of subjective memory of the country I once knew, through colour and light. The people in the photographs merge with their surroundings, reflecting a sense of belonging to place while also revealing the distance created by time.
Note on the title
The title brings together two literary references about Poland. Don’t ask about Poland quotes a song by Grzegorz Ciechowski, “Nie pytaj o Polskę” (“Don’t ask about Poland”), expressing the difficulty of speaking about the country. The subtitle refers to Witold Gombrowicz’s idea of “tajemnicze odchylenie” (“mysterious deviation”) from his Diary 1953–1956, a way of thinking about identity from a position of distance.
Tricity (Gdynia, Gdańsk, Sopot) 2014 - ongoing