The intricate and searching eye of photographer Joanna Piotrowska is presented this Summer with A moment of darkness at noon. Born in Poland and based in Porto, Piotrowska has an interest in domestic space and human-made environments, “which she pursues through experiments with photography’s expanded field in collage, textile, and the sculptural possibilities of image-making. Her psychologically charged photographs probe human behaviour and the dynamics of familial relations, exploring childhood memories, expression and practices of intimacy.”

In this Scottish showcase, she gathers newly commissioned photographs and collages into a deliberately tuned environment where the domestic becomes shelter and stage. The quiet tension of her perfectly graded monochromes however between memory and gesture. Piotrowska’s subjects are formed from family archives, animal presences and fragments of material form, set in a luminous mid light. Their strangeness as well as the perfection of composition create a compelling pull into the scene she has set.

Open to coincide within Glasgow International 2026, the exhibition reads as a study in psychic weather, with some reference to Jungian psychoanalysis and a particular focus on intuitive and pre-verbal forms of expressionand some reminiscence of the work of Alain Renais and Chris Marker, the images conjure the everyday and the theatrical simultaneously, hung between exposure and concealment. Images drift into view as though the unconscious has learned to speak through scale, cropping, and proximity, where collage becomes a form of listening. Piotrowska offers no hierarchy of meaning; instead she stages a precise ambiguity in which the self appears as a provisional arrangement, tenderly held and perpetually in motion.

Joanna Piotrowska: A moment of darkness at noon at The Common Guild, Glasgow

Fri 22 May – Sat 18 July