Post

While I was in the middle of creating a photo series about fears and neurosis, something unforeseen happened: I was involved in a serious car accident. After months of surgeries, physical limitations and the aggravation of my anxiety neurosis, I decided to finish this work.

In 2013, I survived a serious car accident. I was close to death, and reality – one that I had been adapting to with difficulty – slipped through my fingers. This misfortune brought about another: surgeries, months of physical limitations, a breakup, and the return and aggravation of anxiety neurosis.

Not long before the accident, I had found in my family home a teacher's descriptive feedback from the time I was a seven-year-old, exemplary student. I am still one in my adult life. However, despite the opinion of others, my limitations, shame and anxiety are still teeming inside me. I started taking the first photographs as a way of incantation of fear in an aesthetic image. The accident brought my work to a halt. My mind was filling up with fragmentary memories, and sharp, detached details. My own physicality and pain became a source of images that felt more and more substantial and bodily as time passed.

"Post" is a project about trauma, frozen in dead greyness, silence and tension. Everyone can find their own punctures here – exhausting dreams, fears, obsessions. An individual way of discovering a twin traumatic memory in another person, "Post" is an attempt at intimate contact which closes the past non-experience in the present.

Translation (Untitled 02, from the Post series)

Descriptive evaluation of the primary school student

Class I, the first semester

Schoolgirl Marta Zgierska is talented, conscientious and hard-working. During lessons she is very active and focused. She has a rich vocabulary and a large body of knowledge. She can build a coherent, complex statement, correct in terms of material and grammar. She reads fluently and expressively. She writes very nicely and accurately in terms of language and spelling.

She is fluent in mental arithmetic. She solves simple and more complex text exercises. She can apply in practice acquired knowledge. She is interested in phenomena occurring in nature, she knows their causes and effects.

She shows extensive interests and talents. She has good manners. She is friendly and liked by other children.

The Teachers' Board, 19th January, 1995

Malgorzata Smalec