In Ciało [EN body], I want to dig my first communion ceremony up. In this photography series I reframed the pictures taken that day to make a focus on the white dress I wore. The series is associated with current self-portraits I made using my dad’s analog camera – the same one he used to document my first communion ceremony.
In Dom I’m questioning the male/female dynamics within two groups I’m familiar with: the family I left in Poland and the working-class Polish community I met in Brussels. I’m also interrogating the importance of houses in this male/female dynamic. I want to play with what they stand for: Houses that divide, houses that create territories over here and over there. Houses that Polish males built and destroy. Houses that Polish cleaning ladies clean. The house that I fled from and the home that I’m trying to build in Brussels. Dom is written by Wiktoria Synak, directed by Wiktoria Synak and Erwan Augoyard and performed by Wiktoria Synak, Anouk Boyer-Mazal and Olga Wyszkowska.
Wiktoria Synak
Wiktoria Synak (b. 1994, Gdynia, Poland) studied at Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, ESADMM in Marseille and ArBA-EsA in Brussels. She is currently based in Brussels, Belgium.
It’s been seven years since I left Poland, my native country. The departure created the need to question my homeland. It swings constantly back in my mind and in my works. What I try to understand is why Poland resonates in me. Why do I constantly look for it abroad whereas all I wanted was to escape from it? Finally, how can I free myself from it? Answers never come; only more questions appear. Somewhere between past and present stories, speculations; an opportunity for me to wander through different identities.
My practice mixes photography, physical presence, text, installation and sound. Our My work in progress, Dom* [EN house, home], lies between performance and theatre play, not suiting plainly to either of them. It engages two performers and me, a setting that is being constructed during the show and numerous stories that come along with it. What I explore is the visual mean in which a story, a memory, or an image is transmitted throughout a performative act.
* Dom is written by Wiktoria Synak, directed by Wiktoria Synak and Erwan Augoyard and performed by Wiktoria Synak, Anouk Boyer-Mazal and Olga Wyszkowska.
