In the post-colonial Kenyan landscape, it is men – who, unlike Piotrowska, pose naked without exception – who become objectified sexual objects. For a short moment, global capitalism and neo-colonialism prevail over patriarchy. The photographic story by Piotrowska is close to films such as Paradise: Love by Ulrich Seidl, telling the story of African sex tourism practised by middle-class representatives of the global North. Again, however, Piotrowska is not interested in documenting, but in bringing out the widest possible range of real emotions, this time including her own discomfort, from the staged situation.
The exceptional in terms of form visual essay entitled The Black Garden, which is somewhat of a distant after-image of 5128, published in Frieze magazine together with a text written by Harry Thorne, is also connected with working through one’s own fears. In this work, Piotrowska moved the lens back from people to plants, but this time that was not entirely her own choice. Furthermore, this time the aesthetically sophisticated photographs of flowers have nothing to do with trite still-lifes. The photographs shot in a London garden recall a story that took place in the mountains of the Caucasus, in the area of Nagorno-Karabakh – a disputed territory between Azerbaijan and Armenia, formally belonging to the former, in practice a separate country, though not recognised by any other government.