“Frowst” is a rarely used term in English. Equally noun and verb, it also means fug as well as squatting in fug – but in the phrase “to frowst by the fire” it takes on a positive connotation, meaning to warm up by the fire. The Polish photographer Joanna Piotrowska chose the word as the title of her first picture story, for which she had adult members of a family, based on photographs from their children’s albums, pose side by side, on top of each other or intertwined, rigid and cold like sculptures, their gazes inward because it is directed outwards, so that as a viewer one does not want to decide whether all feelings have died down in domestic misery or whether emotions are boiling up at any moment. Whether hugs on the sofa with the flokati cover lead to intimate tenderness or to breaking bones. Whether the kiss that the brother gives to the brother on the cheek will be followed by a bite on the ear. And whether the girl in a man’s lap on a wobbly garden chair is just lying back and relaxing – or has literally been killed. With Joanna Piotrowska, behind every gesture lurks a moment of violence, behind every expression hope and fear at the same time.
“Frowst” is a hilarious collection of irritating family constellations, tested where the stuffy, claustrophobic ambience between cheap oriental carpets, crocheted pillowcases and dried house plants leaves you no air to breathe. The series was published as a book in 2014, attracted a great deal of attention and brought Joanna Piotrowska (born 1985) exhibitions at places including MoMA in New York, Tate Britain in London and the Kunsthalle Basel. Her works will hang at the Venice Biennale until autumn. And now she has impressively set up a small, intimate room for the Kestner Society in Hanover: with soft carpeting, over which one floats rather unsteadily than walks with firm steps, with skin-colored curtains as room dividers, with black-and-white prints in very different sizes that generously spaced between the floor and the ceiling, and with three film projectors rattling loudly and looping images of women on the wall, pointing to the most sensitive parts of the body, from the eye, ear and throat to the liver and instep of the foot, or in slow motion and as if it were the choreography of an avant-garde expressive dance, performing twisted movements from a self-defense class.
escape or defense
This is exactly what Joanna Piotrowska’s work is about: self-defence, liberation, protection and perhaps also the possibility of escape. But she rarely puts it as clearly as she does with the shots of people crouching in little houses that they have put together in their apartments from blankets, mattresses and pieces of furniture. Rather, she leaves most of it in limbo, most obviously where she has women mimic sometimes very uncomfortable and almost always overly awkward poses from the instructions of a martial arts manual, but the opponents are consistently absent from her images. One has to imagine that the ancient sculptors of the Laocoön group left out the snakes in the agony of the father and his two sons.
