Koža, Women & Other Stories

"Koža, Women & Other Stories" is a set of interwoven narratives that explore connection, uncertainty and desire.

"Koža, Women & Other Stories" is a set of interwoven narratives that explore connection, uncertainty and desire.

This work began when I moved to Slovakia in 2015 and is a poetic expression of my travels in the last five years. In it, I document the unfolding narrative of my experience, disjointed and retold into a story of companionship and isolation. During this time, I also connected with the Archive of Modern Conflict (AMC), photographing objects in their collection. These photographs move the project beyond the limitations of my own experience: relics of a broader world.

"Koža, Women & Other Stories" is a kind of photographic unrest. Thriving on change, it references the artist, but belongs to no one in particular. Contemporary in both its chaos and visual diversity, it is part archive, part travelogue, part fact, and part fiction. It questions the veracity of the photograph, the biography and the archive in general. By collapsing multiple bodies, timeframes and geographies, this work stands as a metaphor for the changeability and instability of human experience. In Slovak, koža means skin.

This project also uses analogue technologies to celebrate the experimental darkroom. It blends a variety of processes, papers, scales and subjects. This variety allows me to create visual poems that explore the emotional undercurrents of an environment, and emphasize the materiality of the photograph – a print with a particular texture, tonal range and tint, an object you can hang on the wall or hold in your hands.

This project was selected as a finalist for the Louis Roederer Discovery Award of Les Rencontres d’Arles, 2020.