Post

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.

Marta Zgierska (1987) is a visual artist working at the intersection of art and science. She holds MFA in Photography (The Leon Schiller National Film, Television and Theatre School), MA in Drama and MA in Journalism. She is interested in trauma studies, liminal experience and a process of withdrawal. In 2016 she won prestigious Prix HSBC pour la Photographie. Her project Post has been published as a book by Actes Sud in 2016.