Marzena Wasikowska
"I left Poland when I was 11 years old and 24 years later I went back for the first time. These photographs are the narrative of my family’s visit. The work is an emotional response to reflections on my childhood; to memories that persist in irritating the present; to re-establishing contact with my father and relatives; to my observations of Polish lifestyle; to the its urban and rural landscape; to stories people told me of war-time Poland and to my reading of a book, Smoke over Birkenau, in Polish while I was there.
What fascinates me is the way ideas are brought together by linked still photographs. When photographs are brought together, the temporal differences between the moments that each of them records creates a space. Its a conceptual space under their influence and to varying degrees there is room for remembering personal significances, for the construction of fictions, for flights of imagination. (From series, I Left Poland when I was 11 years old, 1998-2000)"
(Marzena Wasikowska 2007)
