User:Agnes Janich/sandbox

Agnes Janich
Agnes Janich (née Agnieszka Monika Jeziorska de Rogala in 1985 ) is a contemporary visual artist. She does film, installation & performance, but her primary medium is photography. Her works have been exhibited i.e. in Progr, Bern, 9th Sharjah Biennial, UAE , the CCI Fabrika, Moscow, RU , the Bergen Museum of Art, NO , the MLAC, Rome and presented in Fotomuseum Winterthur and the MEP in Paris.

Private life
Janich was born to Jan Jeziorski de Rogala, an entrepreneur who dealt with European-Asian and European-African foreign trade, and Anna Jeziorska de Rogala née Janich, an English professor who licensed diplomats for their foreign missions. She grew up very close to her maternal grandparents, Jan Janich, a prolific businessperson, founder of four successful companies, one of them listed on the Warsaw stock exchange, and former diplomat (nominated Ambassador of the Republic of Poland in Ecuador and member of the trade unit of the Embassy of the Republic of Poland in Tel aviv), and Jadwiga Janich née Pluta de Kuczaba, a well-educated financial analyst who chose to become a housewife. Janich's father holds a PhD in German Literature and was educated i.e. at the University of Leipzig. Janich voluntarily took her last name from her great grandmother, Helena Janich, a prolific entrepreneur born in 1908. In an interview for Channel 1 Radio, Janich stated: "Even though I get feedback from male viewers that they identify, that this is how they felt (...), and I'm thrilled to hear that, the works are done by a woman.(...) I still think most of all I am a human being who believes people deserve certain rights."

In 2007 in New York, Janich chose to belong to the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue on the Upper West Side. She has since actively practiced the religion, celebrating holidays and belonging to the Beit Warszawa liberal Jewish community in Polandl. Janich said in an interview: "To me, European Judaism is a little bit different, there is the context of rebirth here, of life despite the Annihilation. In the US there's almost only the concept of life. One can not escape the memory of 6.5 million Jews being gassed here. I don't think it is even okay to avoid this thought. Anyway, in the US it's easier to live, to dance, to eat challach in the synagogue holding hands with one's boyfriend and singing Lecha dodi in a mini skirt."

Roots of the artist's work
Janich, born in 1985 in Lodz, Poland, grew up in Singapore (aged 0-5), the Republic of South Africa (aged 6-9) , Poland (aged 10-18) and New York (aged 19-23). Her childhood across four continents sensitised her to sociopolitical questions. Raised bilingual, English-Polish, she studied Zulu and Xhosa tribal languages very early on. After perfecting her French at language camps in Provence, Janich focused on learning Swahili, thinking of returning to Africa which, with Mandela marches and the Ghandi school of non-violent law, shaped her conscience. While studying Art History at the University of Warsaw, she learned Latin, achieving a fluency in grammar and perfecting her knowledge Latin proverbs. She also studied German, reaching a communicative level. She later on decided, much to the chagrin of her parents, to leave for New York, where she resided until 2009. After a sojourn in Poland (2009-2016), she moved to Geneva, Switzerland, where she resides permanently. A European citizen, American Social Security card holder and Swiss resident, she is described as "a citizen of the world".

Education

Janich attended primary schools in the Republic of South Africa and Poland. She famously staged a home strike at the age of 6, opposing her parents’ plan to put her in an all-white boarding school, the most prestigious in the country. She chose the Sandown Primary instead, a no longer existing school that was a tolerance lab in post-apartheid South Africa ("I had all sorts of children at school. Hardly anyone could pronounce the other persons' name. We all had different faiths, different parents, but we played together. (...) No matter how hard one tries, some things are incredibly hard to eradicate from the adult world. That's where children loose their innocence. This innocence is the point of art." ) In Poland, she attended one of the Ministry of Education’s top-ranking primary schools, nr 190. She completed her Baccaulerat with 6.0/6.0 at the Jam Saheb Digvijay Sinjhi High School in Warsaw, Poland’s then nr 1 school and its first apolitical educational entity of the post-Communism period. The school famously rejected both daughters of left and right wing Presidents of Poland, thus maintaining its political neutrality. As Photography didn’t feature as a separate department at the Academies of Fine Art when Janich graduated high school, one year earlier than her peers, she enrolled in Art History at the University of Warsaw. She then completed two Degrees with Honors at the European Academy of Photography and enrolled in the School of Visual Arts and New Media, which sourced professors from the eponymous Lodz Film School. The school later became part of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, and, after a brief sojourn there, Janich left for New York to graduate from the School of Visual Arts, New York.

Dolls / acting (2003-2006)
In her early years, Janich had an interest in acting and hypocrisy. She worked with a 35mm camera, the kind she still cherishes, and produced 40 x 60 cm silver gelatin prints. Skilled in darkroom work, she felt it didn’t add to her practice and thus chose to work with assistants to copy her prints, based on darkroom tests and small format Artist’s Proofs she produced herself. Traversing the world in search of doll museums, doll clinics and doll collectors, she produced two important series in that period. Monika Małkowska wrote about the Artist's debut: "The meaning of the images is striking”, "The Divine project is composed of eleven prints. Eleven exclamation marks made of toys. (...) Agnes Janich destroyed dolls and pieced them together to remind us that what she did to dolls, others do now - to other people.” “at first I associated what I saw with cruelly erotic works of Hans Bellmer (…) But no. What inspired her were medical experiments carried out by sadistic physicians on defenseless patients. Torture justified by scientific progress. Neurologists from the Parisian hospital of Salpetriere, raping their teenage patients; Nazi doctors determined to create genetic mutants. (…) What resulted is '''a remarkably intense body of work with an exceptional aura. Seemingly surreal, yet about reality.'''” Tomasz Sikora added: "with a child-like faith in her ideals, she lets reality touch her to the bone. She reacts in images that scream with meaning."
 * Divine,2006, a series of mise-en-scenès of dolls referencing medical experiments, torture and genocide. Interested in human rights and active in Amnesty International and women’s rights organisations, Janich, then a woman of 21, was enraged at the Pitié Salpêtrière experiments on teenage hysteria patients. She felt that the fact that neurologists drugged up and raped their patients while asking them to perform on a stage during an epileptic seizure, as described by Georges Didi-Hubermann in the Invention of hysteria, could not be excused by science. Coming from a family of WW2 survivors, raised by her great aunt with stories from a labor camp, Janich began visiting concentration camps and looking through archives of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, the Imperial War Museum in London and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC . She referenced both the Pitié Salpêtrière photographs and those documenting Joseph Mengele’s medical experiments during WW2 in her works.


 * I-doll-atry, 2006, a silver gelatin collection of portraits of people and their doll alter egos. Janich photographed people, with their consent, in Eastern Europe: Poland, Ukraine and Lithuania, pairing their portraits with those of dolls in Western Europe: France, Italy and Switzerland.

War (2003-2015)
Janich’s American period sparked her interest in the dissonance between the United States of Amnesia and the outpouring of memory so natural for her survivor family members. Janich began creating large-scale participative film, sound and fire installations, their scope mirroring war's destructive force. Her art always reflects real events and thus it was important for her to visit as many different concentration camp sites as possible. When she reached 19, she had visited Auschwitz 14 times, stopping at the camp grounds at times even before visiting her parents upon her returns from New York. In the US, she worked with WW2, Vietnam and Iraq veterans in the framework of Veterans Against the War, and collected concentration camp diaries, often so graphic they were only published once and only in Polish. She then embarked on a tedious experimentation process, involving walking barefoot and lying naked on the snow, sleeping 4h nights, eating only two products (apples and potatoes) and having her head shaved bare for 5 years. At the same time, she voraciously studied WW2 documentation, going through as many as 11,000 pictures of children’s corpses in one weekend. The critics wrote: "The effect is mind-boggling. Passers-by stop and exchange remarks on the piece. Memory is coming back." "This unique project is not just an arts event. (...) Bits and Pieces is also a commemoration of the child victims of the Holocaust. (...) Though adults also died in the ghetto, Agnes Janich focusses on children. After all, they are the ones who lost even their childhood, one's priciest treasure, here." "Janich's subtle and precious piece". hailed Poland's leading daily, Gazeta Wyborcza, also publishing an interview with the artist.
 * Bits and Pieces, 2010, an installation on forced child labor on the former ghetto buildings in Janich’s hometown of Lodz. Janich’s great grandmother (who Always Had Strawberries for Her, Even in the Winter, as a short film title informs the viewers), lived across the street from what was once the ghetto hospital. There, Nazi German soldiers in WW2 would thrust children through the windows to their deaths . Janich adorned the modernist building with a grid of pastel coloured children’s sleepers. She placed doll dresses on a building that housed their manufacture, and earmuffs on another former factory. The three temporary installations activated the memory of the inhabitants of the district and provided an ephemeral memorial to children with graves in the air.

Likeyou.ch, the Swiss art network, wrote: "Janich's perspective of a young woman - obsessed by the past, a past free from glorification or demonization - reconstructs with impressive intuition that what she has never known. (...) Janich avoids nothing: neither the emptiness that the killed leave behind, nor the quasi-obscene when this emptiness materialises."

In a monographic essay, a critic associated with the New York magazine, Art Forum, Thyrza Nichols Goodeve, PhD, wrote: "In Cleanliness is Goodliness my name— Thyrza Nichols Goodeve —is a bar of soap. When I see this there is a feeling I attach to this. It is a queasy sensation deep in the area of my stomach. It causes me to have associations that are personal, revolting, disgusting, angry. No heroes. No martyrs. Raw experience. Can this be cleansed? (...) No bar of soap can clean itself of the fact of having no first-hand memory of an experience. The bodies, the persons are not here. But Janich is making this very memory for us, right here and now." Der Standard Editor added: "Janich works around materializing history and the everyday presence of products of National Socialist atrocities, such as soaps from people's fat. In its simplicity the installation goes under the skin." while Falter Magazine pondered: "Fear turning into empathy and dismay - these are the feelings which Agnes Janich provokes without moralizing about looking and overcoming the past."
 * Cleanliness Is Goodliness, 2009-2012, an installation of soaps symbolically made from the artist, her family and friends, referencing the fact that Nazi Germans made soaps of people. The artist measured the amount of her body body and hand carved bars of soap of a weight corresponding to that of her body fat's weight with her name. She then asked family, friends and colleagues for permission to make symbolic soaps with their name, thus mirroring her constant fear of her family disappearing in the crematorium oven. At the CCI Fabrika, Moscow incarnation of the project, visitor’s body fat was measured and corresponding amount of soaps were hand carved on the spot.

"The Polish artist Agnes Janich created an overwhelming parcours with her film installation Man To Man. (...) the anguish provoked by the barred dogs gradually turns into commiseration. They could be prisoners facing us." Silas Marti of La Folha de Sao Paulo wrote: "Moreover, it evokes the extent to which an almost complete state control of media and culture stifles humanity's potential. This exhibit challenges people to open their eyes to everything (...) around them." LeMonde.Fr added: "In the case of a vague and oppressive labyrinth of the young Polish artist Agnes Janich, we are faced literally eye to eye with howling dogs. Man To Man evokes the Auschwitz dog kennels. The corridor walls get closer and closer as if trying to smother you, while, in year head, you hear your own heavy breathing." The 9th Sharjah Biennial catalog essay read: "The distinct suggestion of dirty wet fur, ruddy dog breath and high-pitched fear in Agnes Janich's terrifying video installation Man To Man." , while Obieg, the CCA Zamek Ujazdowski magazine, wrote: "A silently marveling German shephard, a joyful puppy so keen to play, a bitter, insecure old dog. One of the films, much different from the others, evokes anxiety and fear, especially in the context of the barking dogs around. It pictures shovels full of bones un-scraped yet of body parts. Amidst these corpses, dogs are wandering. This setting provokes the worst fantasies - those of pseudo-shelters, where dog fat is industrially produced, and those of animal treatment in China, where dogs spend their days in tiny cages, waiting to be stripped naked when alive. However, the bone heaps bring to mind heaps of corpses dumped into mass graves.(...) The work (...) draws attention to individual pain." Vienna Review noted: "Ferocious fangs, vicious snarls and wild wagging tails greet those who dare enter the black labyrinth. Thankfully, the dogs are barred by fences and are merely projected onto video screens. Their bark is indeed worse than their bite." Der Standard added: "One is trapped in the labyrinth-like passage of dogs. (...) One feels audible aggressiveness." ,while The National summed up: "One of the sprawling exhibition’s most ambitious works is Man to Man by the Polish artist Agnes Janich. (...) the piece is a huge pitch-black labyrinth scored with the sound of barking dogs and accompanied by wall projections of close-up gnashing fangs and claws. This extremely claustrophobic work is a comment about prisons and enslavement."
 * Man to Man, 2009, a labyrinth of films of dogs both haunting and serene. This 40m2, pitch dark film installation was first built at the 9th Sharjah Biennial . Based on the plan of the doghouse in Auschwitz, it lead the viewer through degrees of fear and intermittent peace to a harrowing finale adorned with a film of rotten bloody bones. The installation incited well over a dozen glowing reviews on 3 continents, thus proving the artist’s intention on surpassing national boundaries in talking about the war.

“A crowd is gathering. (…) After a while, the crowd is joined by an unusual individual. Everything about her is different. Dressed in white, she emanates warmth and gratitude. It's the author of the performance, Agnes Janich. (…) She states: I'm only the reason, you are the actors. Everyone takes five things with them: a candle, a floating cup, matches, a piece of paper and a pen. The mystic ambiance is much enhanced by the scant moonlight shining through the dark trees. We form a circle surrounded by torches and listen to the artist's request. Agnes asks us to move 70 years back in time. It's a sunny Sunday afternoon. We're strolling down the streets... Then a sperra [mass arrest] begins. Some of us run away, some hide, but most of us end up in the crematorium, only to fertilise Sola River's dark waters. These moments, though they touched our grandparents, still hurt. We, being fortunate enough to be alive, should remember. Every one of us lights a candle. We write down the names of our loved ones and burn them in a candle floating down the stream. Our eyes follow the tiny light disappearing in the dark. This ephemeral monument to the living aims to remind us of what happened, but also of those around us today. The piece enriches spiritually, giving us a sense of a deep social bond and a gratitude for participation.” Swiss Landbote wrote: “This performance, Lightning the Night, invites the audience through candles and personal secrets to think of the fragility of human life (…) she and the curator Maja von Meiss were able to create an incomparable moment and a space for true human contact."
 * Lighting the Night, 2008-2010, a site-specific, performative installation, bringing the experience of mass shootings to present day. At the Barcelona incarnation of the project, visitors held hands and shared a minute of silence for war victims. At the Auschwitz participatory installation, visitors, standing at the site of mass shootings, where Auschwitz inmates' bodies began their travel directly into the sea, lit candles that then floated down the same path . The German Consul visited the project, widely lauded as bringing good Energy back to the city.

The work sparked a critical discourse between two of Poland’s leading art critics, Dorota Jarecka, accusing the work of bringing happiness to the viewers , and Poland's leading culture critic commenting on the Holocaust, Professor Joanna Tokarska-Bakir , who wrote: " The phenomenon itself, analyzed in depth, is dissonance at its best. The representation, if successful, is to add to it, not replace it. It's much easier to say: I never did a work about the Holocaust.”
 * A Real Boy's Show, 2010, a vernacular photographic meditation on the impulses that drive war.

The sculpture, supported by both the City (via its conseiller communal, a Swiss equivalent of the President of the City) and Canton of Neuchâtel garnered critical attention with numerous media mentions, e.g.in the art journal Accrochages, the dailies Le Courrier and L'Express , where it made the front page. The audience's reactions where fervent and ranged from children feeding themselves on the foodstuffs incorporated into the sculpture and adults commencing a dialogue on inclusiveness. A consensus was reached with audience members hailing from the US, India and Switzerland: no person should be made illegal. No soul should be made to flee their home, never to return.
 * The Sound of Music, 2015, an installation on the use of music as an instrument of war.
 * Maison orpheline / Home Forlorn, 2016, an ephemeral sculpture on houses left empty and abandoned by persons deported during the war.         Maison orpheline was built in Galerie C, Neuchatel as a comment on those who lived their normal, daily lives until war interfered. A sculpture of both readymade materials (table cloths, garments, children's sleepers, glasses, porcelain cups) and living materials left to putrefy (apples, pears, oranges, cucumbers), it underlined the void left empty by those we as a society loose to war.

Love / body (2009-2016)
After her graduation from the School of Visual Arts, New York, Janich decided to explore her Polish roots and solidify her visual language to ensure she can remain independent to future pressure from various stakeholders. She went on to remake her experience, dressing in colourful clothes and beginning an intense visual and textual exploration of complex emotions, bodyness, hypocrisy and nonconformism. Interviewed as part of "Does gender matter" for Radio Channel 1, she admitted: "I'm always inspired by my very private, intimate feelings. Be it Annihilation, the experience of being treated as an object (...) or Family, the works are always drawn on my personal emotions." She confided to Writer TV, Edinburgh: "What I'm told by art critics, and perhaps it's true, that (...) it's an aftermath of the earlier works, which were far more political."
 * That You Have Someone, 2012, erotic photographs of the artist and her partner, written over by texts on impossible love stories from a time of war. Janich observed the public’s innate opposition to topics of war, cannibalism and sacrificing a life for a life. She felt, however exploring these topics made her calmer, gentler and more appreciative of life, and wanted to share her awe at people’s courage to live life to the fullest in the face of death.

“Looking closely, on one of the bodies of the lovers one can see a stigma, a kind of tattoo: a short outline of a love story, written and engraved on the skin in brave student writing. They are collections of confessions which Janich found during her research on the WW2 in diaries of Holocaust survivors. Under the skin of today’s  young Europeans - whether of Jewish origin or not - the spirits of that time are still alive. So says the artist, and to make it more convincing she uses her very own body. There is no doubt that the strategy of seduction implemented by Janich, educated in New York and operating internationally, is as cold-blooded as it is clever. (…) Conciliatory. Yes, this is it. David Seymour (Chim), who lost his parents in a Nazi death camps, used child war victims in his message of peace. Agnes Janich, from the Facebook generation, uses the eroticism of her own body to bring us to the same conclusion. And perhaps even further. From the feeling of guilt to the state of - harmony?”, wrote Daniele Muscionico of Neue Zürcher Zeitung.

Marta Raczek-Karcz, PhD, pondered in Obieg: "Agnes Janich painstakingly researched the archives of Auschwitz, Mauthausen-Gusen, Majdanek, Bergen Belsen, Ravensbrueck. She read diaries published but once, in 1950’s Poland. She devoured Hanna Krall’s and Marek Edelman’s novels and met dozens of survivors in a constant search of a tactic that would allow her not just to archive or chronicle, but to comment upon (…) the body. Yet not an annihilated body. A body that wants and desires. That loves. A body outside the limits of history. (…)

Stories recalled by Agnes Janich speak of a war that leaves no place for hope. A mother cannibalizing on her own child just to die a few days later, a woman who will wait sixty years for a lover never to return from the dead, Anka, who remains loyal to her fiancé and thus dies in a concentration camp…'''All these women are battered by the war and its inhumane rights, yet they win. They win by loving and desiring.''' (...)

What terrified yesterday’s perpetrators is too much to take by today’s historians. The love and desire the camp guards tried so hard to erase is today being erased from the heroic, martyrological tales of victims. Janich successfully brings up an otherwise silenced topic. She also brings back the dignity to these bodies - now people, much deserving their place in Holocaust narration." Gazeta Wyborcza asked: "How would you love in the shadow of Auschwitz's chimneys? (...) An important if at times shocking show of Agnes Janich in BWA Zielona Gora. Brave, erotic imagery at times bordering on kitsch.", others hailed "A taboo-breaking exhibition. Pain, loneliness and difficult relationships, all this as told by the international artist, Agnes Janich, in her films and photographs." . A feminist art critic added quietly: '''"Perhaps only art can get us closer to the what and why of the Holocaust. Perhaps it can speak volumes that survivors cannot tell."'''

Lyle Rexer, an art critic associated with Aperture, wrote: "At first glance the connection between the anecdotes and the images appears fortuitous or even ironic, as if lovemaking is trivial in the face of these terrible situations. But Janich’s point seems to be much more emotionally complex than that. (…) Pleasure has a setting, a background, and for anyone these days this background is full of shadows. At the same time, of course, it is precisely such moments of physical and emotional connection that enable people to survive the most horrendous situations, make choices that involve supreme sacrifices, and consecrate their lives to remembrance and faith. Janich’s greatest strength is that she locates this capacity for love and the vulnerability to violence in the same place: the body.  There are no abstractions in her work; everything has to be lived before it can be known and remembered. Only then – with the help of art as part of the process of living – can liberation begin." The Viennese Art Magazine wrote: "Janich, a young artist, asks us: How to love in the shadow of the crematoria? How can we feel the past? (...) She questions human relationships by observing behaviors we would rather forget about." Thyrza Nichols Goodeve, PhD, associated with Art Forum, added: “Pujol suggests, and Janich’s work acts out, how there is no static self but only one wholly susceptible to time (the displacement and deferral of Derrida's différance), ever in evolution, in a state of becoming. (…) Janich produces the fragmented discourse of the self as a lover’s discourse (Barthes’ book, after all, is called A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments); of memory, affect, and absent presence. Both war and love explode the boundaries of the self, as Agnes Janich shows. But we are given the chance as viewer’s to begin again in a language of the body. (…) I say to the other (old or new): in War and Love, let us begin again."  Professor Joanna Tokarska-Bakir added sadly: ”Agnes Janich is suspicious. Normally someone like her would explain themself. She doesn't. For comparing love to Treblinka she gets pulled to pieces like Sarah Kane. She personalizes the topic to the limits of the bearable. She universalizes. Sometimes she's almost lying for the benefit of the truth.

She found a way: herself. Making soaps out of her young, model-like body. Staging pictures of sex serving as a background for stories of cannibalism and exchanging a life for a life. '''Her full breasts and childlike face don't make the truth of those moments any better. Love here is useless like a soul in Treblinka."'''

In O.pl, Poland's leading culture portal, Zuzanna Sokolowska analyzed: "It is difficult to ponder on the unquestionable visual pleasure of looking at the works since they, at the same time, make one's stomach hurt.(...) An essay on self-destruction with the common denominator of the body. The past is written into it, a past Janich tries to decode. It's most obvious language is pain, pain making her know that she still feels, making her make good with the world. The artist is not afraid to abuse her bodily flesh to show us the haunting secrets of existence normally just whispered upon. Her body becomes an absolute, a sacrifice, an offering. An all-encompassing declaration of: I will do everything, give everything, just to get closeness in return." and concluded: "The artist redefines nudity in its current cultural context. Body Memory is made of a double optics: first, of the limited, physical body, second, of its liveliness, its sensuality, its intimacy, its identity, all facing the unrelenting power of history." In Amor Fati: an Anthropological Philosophical Journal, Sokolowska wrote: "Janich treats her own physicality as a vessel for memory - a memory that needs be forever galvanised and preserved. (...) She transgresses the boundaries of her own materiality in her brutal, difficult performances, where the worst suffering is inflicted upon her very body." Agnieszka Gniotek added "This is the most horrifying - and the most beautiful - love letter."

While Marta Raczek-Karcz, PhD, summed up “Dominic LaCapra writes from the point of view of psychoanalysis: these reflections prove the need for critical work on the topic of memory in the hope of bringing back an imagined past and thus opening up the future. Janich does exactly that. Upon seeing her images, we begin to relate. To feel. (...) We become the characters of the story. In her project, Janich picks up on a topic hardly ever present in Holocaust narration. A topic silenced and swept under the carpet, on which Didi-Huberman, touching on the four images remaining from Birkenau: the most important is not there. The body. (…) Janich's hunger for love seems to come from a need to save one's body and oneself. '''My body, my love, my desire are what allow me to believe the illusion of normalcy. They become my weapon in a fight forever unequal, forever fatal yet never forlorn. The fight to save myself.''' (...) Janich's project tells no easy narratives. It is full of stories which shouldn't have taken place but they did. Of stories that we've done so much to silence, layering them with pompous tales of the past. Yet these stories cannot be silenced.”

Likeyou.ch commented from Zurich: "The first impression is misleading. It only prepares the way to additional layers and dramas that play out in these photos. Janich's sexualized images are camouflage. In one image, she shows the fragile eroticism of young bodies that want to be loved. In contrast are the authentic tales of yearning and the threat of death told by former war victims. Janich inserts them into the love scenes with her handwriting, in which she assumes the female role. Thus we enter historical events from today, as they were violently etched into victims' bodies back then. The combination of making love today and the testimonials of former victims written on the bodies asserts the seriousness and depth of Janich's artistic gesture." Zuzanna Sokolowska wrote in Amor Fati: "painfull self-mutilation seems to please the artist. Scary screams, a hastened breath, inducing vomits, cutting her toes with a knife, agressively fondling her own breasts, which may all cause immeasurable pain, are a secret, almost spiritualistic ritual that Janich grants her audience while trying to invoke someone who left her forever. Her reactions are akin to those of an agitated hare, hyponotised by the floodlights. She is jittery and all over the place, as if finding a place of her own was no longer possible. (...) Her behaviour is as much a self-inflicted punishment for the fact that someone left her as it is an obvious attempt to attract attention. Her physicality becomes a repository of memory that is hard both to accept and assimilate in that it lacks the traces of an Other, their touch and their scent. Her body becomes a burden too hard to carry. Janich tries thus to answer the question who is she now that her beloved is gone. She transcends the layer of her body all the way to her self in pondering whether the self still is now that all those that she loved are gone."
 * I Hate My Body When You're Gone, 2009, a film-and-photographic document of rituals expelling someone else's soul from one's body. The series provoked heated reactions from the audience, from admiration for the artist’s audacity ("very controversial and X-rated" ) in channeling both her loneliness  and pain   to biting commentaries that no one will watch her art anymore once her body ages  . Janich comments on both ageism and the terror of the beauty industry ("the violence [in the works] is a hyperbole of the violence I observe, fall prey of or inflict." "It's all autobiographical." ) in numerous works, namely Don’t Hurt Myself, 2009, I Don’t See the Problem, 2015 and What if, 2016.
 * He Fucked Her Good, 2009, a 2-channel video installation on male and female promiscuity. On this installation, a listing of social commentaries describing promiscuous men and women,  Sigrun Asebo wrote: "Agnes Janich's project He Fucked Her Good is, in many ways, a continuation of the subject matter that Chicago and Wilding took up in 1972; our actions are interpreted and attributed value based on the bodies we have. The video depicts a woman and a man undressing with a voice-over of comments about promiscuous men and women. The film of man's legs is accompanied by a flattering female voice that describes his sexual attributes for us: cowboy, he can have every girl he wants, they all for him, he knows how to fuck, he fucked her good. During the film of the female legs, we are shown a pearl necklace, a white feather boa and black fishnet stockings with tears in them while a shrill female voice utters words like slut, slag, bitch, she sleeps around, she'd fuck anyone, etc. The video reminds us that what appears to be the same behavior isn't necessarily the same.(...)What Janich and Brew have in common is that they follow up on the focus of postmodern feminists on language, including visual language, and its significance for our identity. On the whole, they show how it is impossible within our Western culture to transform the male body into an object subjected to female desire; the male body is not a symbol of sexuality, it is a symbol of the human being. A woman who chooses to have sex is not virile, she is a slut." Eli Okkenhaug added: "(...)sexual initiative and sexual autonomy is still, in the eyes of many, restricted to male sexuality."


 * Don't Hurt Myself, 2009, a collection of filmed performances, dealing with solitude the female way. Soft, colourful and at times seemingly naive, the work comments on social taboos, such as the rivalry between the wife and the mother in law for power over a man.
 * I'm Not Afraid / I Can Help Me, 2009, a daring diptych of films dealing with betrayal, portrays the artist meticulously cutting her veins with a razor blade while voicing every reason that led to the dissipation of her relationship. An accompanying video portrays the artist watching the blood solidify and her hand heal while she declares her growing independence from other’s opinions.


 * I Don't Need, 2014, a series of photographs on solitude, written over by text of a seemingly independent woman yearning for love and acceptance. Though strong and financially independent, she still looks for someone to make her fall asleep.


 * What if, 2015, a series of images with text on doubts about a permanent relationship. The obvious: What if you die before me? are countered with the seemingly positive What if you respect me?, What if it works? and What if you don't betray me?, a harrowing account of the life changes incited by a forming partnership.


 * 2 Minutes Late, 2013, 2013, a series of images with text, a belated conversation with someone who passed away, based on the dissonance: You said…and I said…when I wanted to say…, "she unveils internal limitations keeping happiness away by making us say and do things whose only point is to protect our fragile emotions – and not to communicate with the Other."


 * Pink, 2015, simple images of feminine rituals, a very manneristic exploration of the vulnerability hidden behind glamour.


 * Where Did He Go, 2016, a meditation on loneliness situated in and around the bed,  with the female narrator seemingly withdrawing from life in the absence of her loved one.
 * See, 2016, a conversation with an other, held in the presence of nature. At once an accusation, a confession and an apology, See offers the viewers whispers of concentrated emotion, hand-written with shades of red on shades of blue.
 * Sky High, 2017, parallel to See, 2016, an account of the narrator’s growing strength, it replaces fragility with wry humour and features a work titled … How could’ve I loved you / if I don’t like you at all?

Society / social roles (2013-2018)
With works from the societal period, Janich returned to hear early interests in the fake, the hypocritical and the non integral in daily human behaviour. With texts featured prominently on the images, hand written in red over bodies living, loving, mourning and betraying, the societal works provide a biting commentary on the performances we stage to hide from one another (Janich: "what is crucial is the process of observing the world, of understanding what really happens in myself and others around me". )


 * I Don't See the Problem, 2013, 2013, a series of images with text, revealing what conformists choose to hide - financial rivalry in a love relationship (Your successes are fine if only smaller than mine), grief over loveless parenting (This was the best daughter one could dream of), competing for love with other family members (I'm only sorry I married a man with a mother so young I have to count days till her funeral) and materialistic motivations of our actions (-Granny, John really wanted to see you. / -Who is John?).


 * Female Favors, 2015, a series of images with text on female rivalry. This series recounts the pronounced differences between women following two contrasting ways of life: that of the career girl, always the best and often alone, and that of the wife and mother, often frustrated, feeling unwanted and unloved. The series asks the recurring question is Janich’s works: are people’s fears, wants and desires really all that different?

Family (2009-2018)

 * Don't, 2009, a series of films on family behaviours that are rarely talked about. Featuring a daughter that takes out a knife to threaten her fighting parents into calmness and a child locked in incessant hysteria, the series points a finger on what we would rather not talk about, and yet what is much less toxic when it’s expressed.


 * With Our Eyes Closed, 2015, a juxtaposition of a family archive and images of an exterminated community. Janich’s degree work under David Levi Strauss, later amended, this series uses found images to discuss hope in its life-saving and blinding power.


 * My Mom's Diary, 2009, a series of images from her childhood written over with texts on the mother-daughter relationship: of rivalry, love, hate & betrayal. Reworked found images in simple pine frames, as Der Standard, which reviewed the artist numerous times, noted, it critically examines the mother-daughter relationship. It's a work about a family and a woman looking for herself elsewhere.  , while New York art advisor Kipton Kronkite recommended the series to his audience.

Exhibitions / presentations

 * the Fotomuseum Winterthur, CH, in the framework of Platform 2012, curated by Wilhelm Schürmann, Urs Stahel and Thomas Seelig


 * the Bergen Museum of Art, NO, in the monumental show, Desire, 2011, curated by Eli Okkenhaug


 * the Maison Europeene de la Photographie, Paris, FR, in the framework of the 2007 ASEF artist’s exchange (then Agnieszka Jeziorska)


 * the Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, PL, in the All Creatures Great and Small , 2009 exhibition, curated by Maria Brewińska


 * the Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna, AT, in the No more bad girls? exhibition, curated by Claudia M.Stemberger & Kathrin Becker
 * the Stiftelsen 3,14, Bergen, NO, in the No more bad girls? exhibition, curated by Claudia M.Stemberger & Kathrin Becker
 * the Galapagos Art Space [now Kunsthalle Galapagos], New York, NY
 * the 9th Sharjah Biennial, 2009, curated by Jack Persekian


 * the MOCAK, Krakow, PL, in the museum’s first public performance


 * the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, UK, an artist’s talk on Agnes Janich: Body Memory, a critical reader summarising a decade of the artist’s work


 * the Finnish Museum of Photography, Helsinki, FI, an artist’s talk on Agnes Janich: Body Memory
 * the Progr, Bern, CH, in the framework of Fenstersprung, an exhibition curated by Martin Waldmeier.

Patrons and sponsors

 * the Polish Institute in Moscow, RU, the I-Park Foundation, CT, US, the Polish Institute in Vienna, AT, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, VA, US, the Polish Institute in Paris, FR, the Polish Institute in Rome, IT, the Polish Institute in London, UK, the Polish Consulate in Barcelona, ES, the Can Serrat International Art Center, ES, the Polish Embassy in Helsinki, FI, the Polish Embassy in Oslo, NO, the Polish Embassy in Bern, CH, the BB Gallery in Bielsko-Biala, PL , the Bureau of Promotion of the City of Lodz, PL , the Villa Straeuli, Winterthur, CH.