Home and Away, or How to Photograph One's Memories

My group show, Home and Away, opened at the ISE Cultural Foundation at 555 Broadway in New York on Friday 4 November.

My own project is called 'Will You Ever Go Back?'. It is probably the most personal piece I've ever done, although it also aims to raise questions for any unproblematic approximation of 'personal experience' and its potential representations in art.

Anyway, here is the project description:

Joanna Zylinska has been living in the UK for nearly fifteen years. Dwelling on the question she regularly gets asked, by Brits and Poles alike, ‘Will you ever go back?’, for the project presented here she revisits her Polish home town in search of the ghosts of the past. This memory trip leads to some further questions: What does it mean to want to return home? Or not to want to, for that matter? What do we take with us when we leave? What do we leave behind? Most importantly, is there much point in talking about returning if we have not yet established whether ‘leaving home’ is ever even an option? It is the uncertainty of the response to these questions that the series presented here attempts to capture.

British theorist of Caribbean origin Stuart Hall reflects on this vexed experience of leaving home in the following terms: ‘The classic questions which every migrant faces are twofold: “Why are you here?” and “When are you going back home?” No migrant ever knows the answer to the second question until asked. Only then does she or he know that really, in the deep sense, she/he’s never going back. Migration is a one-way trip. There is no “home” to go back to. There never was’. Zylinska’s installation is an attempt to stage this impossibility of capturing something that perhaps never was, at least not in any substantial and fixed way.

In the blurriness of the landscape images and the faded colours of the interior shots, the viewer can also perhaps see the projection of their own memories and fantasies of what is often referred to, however inaccurately, as ‘communist Poland’. Thus some may see the ugliness of the concrete block architecture, joyless repression, martial law and economic crisis, while others may be able to detect outdoor play, shared Christmas meals, traces of sunny holidays in Bulgaria and Cuban oranges.

But the project also goes against photography’s representational, indexical and eidetic ambitions. As we know both from theorists of the image such as André Bazin and Roland Barthes, and from our own experiences of living with snapshots, albums and digicams, photography is typically associated with memory: it is seen as an attempt to capture and preserve memories, to reconstitute them and to both mourn their loss and celebrate their at least partial recuperation. Yet the question that underpins the ‘Will You Ever Go Back?’ project is how one can actually photograph a memory or even a fantasy of a place. What does such a meta-photographic attempt ‘at one remove’, as it were, deliver, and what does it withdraw from us?