Birdies

Birdies maps a fragmented visual landscape of contemporary Poland through black-and-white and color images, bringing together objects, situations, and traces of everyday social interaction.

Many of the images are built around a single, dominant presence - an object, an animal, a structure - set apart within its surroundings. Each frame operates as a self-contained unit, an “island” of meaning that resists full contextualization. Through deliberate sequencing, these fragments enter into relation: visual echoes, repetitions, and subtle shifts create a dispersed yet connected field - a quiet archipelago of everyday life, where proximity does not necessarily produce integration.

The work emerges from the experience of intra-European migration. Shaped by the author’s position as a Slovak living in Poland, the author navigates a space that is both familiar and estranged. The camera becomes a tool that allows presence without full belonging - a way of participating while remaining slightly out of sync. What unfolds is not a unified narrative, but a structure of partial connections, where meaning accumulates across images rather than within a single frame.

Shot predominantly in dim, winter light, the images often resist clear temporal or emotional orientation. They oscillate between recognition and unease, between the banal and the uncanny. Accompanied by short textual fragments, the project connects a remembered childhood with the experience of adult life shaped by voluntary migration.

Birdies does not attempt to resolve the distances it reveals. Instead, it inhabits them. Its logic lies in the relationships between images: individual “islands” remain distinct, yet through sequencing they form a shared, if fragmented, reality - a space of coexistence built on adjacency rather than unity.