Joanna Piotrowska: A moment of darkness at noon

Joanna Piotrowska experiments with photography’s expanded field through collage, textile, and the sculptural possibilities of image-making. A moment of darkness at noon is the artist’s first exhibition in Scotland. It includes a series of newly commissioned, large format photographic works, photographic collage and framing devices created in response to the gallery space.

Piotrowska utilises photography, performance and film to examine the human condition. Her psychologically charged compositions often take place in domestic spaces and constructed environments. These ‘social landscapes’ probe unconscious actions and behavioural responses, addressing the dynamics of familial relations to explore personal expression, childhood memory, and practices of intimacy.

A moment of darkness at noon continues Piotrowska’s extended investigations into her own and others’ unconscious through Jungian psychoanalysis, with a particular focus on intuitive and pre-verbal forms of expression. Her layered collages, including images from the artist’s own family archive, draw inspiration from fragmentary memories and dream states. Nudes, landscapes, scaled-up rock forms, and tightly cropped faces cohere in an ambiguous and hallucinatory space of possibility. Together, these elements map an uncertain territory that exists in a space between memory, dream, and the unconscious. 

According to Jungian psychology, this process resonates with “individuation”, a confrontation between the conscious self and deeper layers of the psyche. As such, Piotrowska’s collages function as evocative constellations emerging from the personal unconscious, where past experiences and emotional residues coexist without hierarchy. For Piotrowska, these fragments are activated through the intensity of midlife transition, a moment of psychic reorientation that prompts reflections on identity, personal history, and what has been forgotten or repressed. 

The exhibition will be part of the 11th edition of Glasgow International, Scotland’s biennial festival of contemporary art, taking place between Friday June 5 and Sunday June 21, 2026.

A moment of darkness at noon is co-produced with Huis Marseille, Amsterdam. With thanks to Phillida Reid and Sam Talbot PR.