From November 10 through January 24, 2027, Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi presents BURROWED, a project that brings together photography and collage. Curated by Leonardo Bigazzi, Joanna Piotrowska’s first solo exhibition at an Italian institution opens in the Project Space at Palazzo Strozzi.
The word burrowed suggests a movement inward, into an intimate space that offers shelter. But it also suggests digging beneath layers of feelings that are repressed, or hard to put into words.
Piotrowska looks closely at domestic life, telling the story of the ambiguities and the hidden tensions in human relationships. Vulnerability can be a form of resistance, protection can turn into constraint or burden, and tenderness can also be read as violence.
Hands and gestures
Hands and gestures recur throughout the exhibition as forms of nonverbal communication, yet through them it becomes possible to express emotions that have settled deep in the psyche. Hands intertwine, suspended between tenderness and control; an enlarged clenched fist rests on a table. Here the expressive potential of the body comes through clearly, in a body of work where tensions and forces manage to coexist through black-and-white photography. The natural world, too, becomes a space where opposing forces live side by side: butterflies feeding on scraps of flesh on a bone lying on the ground evoke the conflict between life and death, between beauty and decay. Violence is rarely explicit, but it lingers, latent, in everyday domestic gestures and in human relationships, and the line between safety and threat stays blurred. In the collages, an archival photograph of the artist’s mother shows a moon laid over her pupil; a newborn appears through a keyhole, in a contrast between the intimate and the inaccessible; an embrace reveals a female body replaced by a tree trunk.
Fragments of stories
The exhibition presents fragments of larger narratives, and it is by interpreting these partial, resistant materials that their hidden meaning surfaces, drawing the viewer into a psychoanalytic process. Just as with the way we perceive reality, the construction of meaning is fragmentary too. Subjects are lifted out of their original contexts and set side by side in mysterious, surprising combinations that at first don’t add up to a coherent whole, like dreams, like memories.
In the collages, a face without a body appears next to an indistinct figure, a giant pig seems to burst into a domestic space, looming over a body lying down, and a face emerges from a chrysalis-like shape hanging from the ceiling.
Piotrowska’s works invite viewers to take an active part in this process of interpretation: an act of construction that is always in the making, constantly negotiated and called into question.
About the artist
Born in 1985, Joanna Piotrowska is a young Polish artist who works with photography, video and performance. Her practice examines human behavior through its gestures and the complex dynamics of family relationships. Her photographs explore intimacy, violence, control and self-defense with meticulous attention to detail, aiming to bring to light the anxieties and power hierarchies that shape domestic life.
Her work has been shown at: Common Guild, Glasgow (2026); Groninger Museum, Groningen (2026); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2025); ICA Philadelphia (2024); Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo (2023); Le Bal, Paris (2023); FRAC Île-de-France, Paris (2023); Kunsthalle Tübingen, Tübingen (2023); the 59th Venice Biennale (2022); the 16th Lyon Biennale (2022); Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover (2022); MACRO, Rome (2020); Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw (2020); Tate Britain, London (2019); Kunsthalle Basel, Basel (2019); NS-Dokumentationszentrum, Munich (2019); MoMA, New York (2018); Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2018); the 10th Berlin Biennale (2018); ICA Singapore (2017); Osservatorio Fondazione Prada, Milan (2016); Hayward Gallery, London (2014); Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2013). In 2023, Joanna Piotrowska received the Camera Austria Award for Contemporary Photography, awarded by the City of Graz.
The exhibition Joanna Piotrowska. BURROWED is promoted and organized by Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi.
Public supporters: Comune di Firenze, Regione Toscana, Città Metropolitana di Firenze, Camera di Commercio di Firenze. Private supporters: Fondazione CR Firenze, Intesa Sanpaolo, Fondazione Hillary Merkus Recordati, Comitato dei Partner di Palazzo Strozzi. With thanks to Consonni Radziszewski (Lisbon, Milan, Warsaw).
