Stable Vices
2021
$40.00
$60.00
Stable Vices by Joanna Piotrowska. First edition (2021). First impression. Medium format hardback in new condition. Signed by Joanna Piotrowska to a dedicated bookplate tipped in to copyright page. No markings. This is a new book. Also, comes with a PVC jacket and black printed page edges. Please see pictures. PayPal accepted, any questions please get in touch.
About Stable Vices
So, the themes of protection, freedom and oppression appear consistently throughout Polish artist Joanna Piotrowska’s oeuvre. Stable Vices includes three photographic series which together focuse on these notions to crystallise a spectrum of concerns that drive her work. One series is inspired by illustrated self-defence manuals and Psychology and Resistance by the feminist psychologist Carol Gilligan. In the series, Piotrowska appropriates the formulaic step-by-step approach of the manuals. However, instead of showing two people in contact, she photographs the (re-) actions of one woman in conflict with an unknown, absent subject. While Gilligan argues in her book that teenage girls risk losing their voice in patriarchal societies, Piotrowska seeks to re-present their agency in corporeal form. She also indicates – through the invisible opponent – the underlying pressures they have to confront. A second series reveals precarious shelters made out of furniture and blankets, situated in domestic spaces. Whilst sculptural in form, these temporary refuges nod to the children’s game of making houses at home, as if domestic space would not provide enough protection. The constructions also reference the makeshift ‘homes’ of homeless people. And last but not least, in the third series, Piotrowska focuses on cages and comparable spaces created for humans, drawing parallels between the lives of certain communities and animals, and the environments in which they live.
