culture.pl
2016
updated: 2026
Agnes Janich is a visual artist doing photography, film and installation. All these media form a unified whole, a platform in which she explores both memory and intimacy. The artist was born in Lodz. She lives and works between Geneva and Ticino in Switzerland.
Agnes Janich is a graduate of the School of Visual Arts in New York, a college that shaped artists such as Keith Haring and Taryn Simon. Janich commenced her education, concluded at SVA, at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. The artist expertly blends fine art photography with a more pop approach. This is visible in her photographic cycles, where form and content are closely intertwined. Her sublime visual language, likening her images to glamour fashion photography, carry uneasy meanings. Complex emotional narratives are camouflaged by the assumed amateurism, utilizing blurred, soft, overexposed and underexposed frames. Janich studied art history in 2000-2003 in the 1st Private High School in Bednarska Street, the legendary school of Polish academic circles, as well as Art History at the University of Warsaw in 2003-2004. This allowed her to analyze and understand the process of image creation in the West. At the same time, her childhood and early youth in places as exotic from the European perspective as Singapore and RSA, sensitized the artist to different cultures and social attitudes. Janich is both a cosmopolitan artist and one constantly exploring private family roots and intimate emotions.
The oeuvre of Agnes Janich to-date can be divided into two clear periods.
The first period, dating until 2012, war violence and the Annihilation as seen through private memories was central to the practice of the artist. This, however, was not a typical take on the Annihilation, but one were women played a pivotal role. Janich talks about what is usually silenced in historical narration. Her focus are the stories of women desperately trying to maintain their physical and emotional integrity, as well as children stripped bare of their childhood by the war. Below two examples from 2010: Il suffit de passer le pont and A Real Boy’s Show. The first is a combination of pictures of children in concentration camps with everyday snapshots from times of peace. Facing this work leads one to a shocking conclusion: regardless of the path of history, children on both sides of the fence were in fact exactly the same. Identical. The only thing that differs in relation to them is their imagery conveyed to us. Some pictures show carefree play, others confront childhood naïveté with suffering and death. This is a work about memory as the warrant of our humanity, not unlike Bits and Pieces, 2010. The latter is an installation bringing back and saving from oblivion the memory of the youngest in the Łódź ghetto, situated in the artist’s home district. The youngest that could neither move past its prison walls nor survive the war. A Real Boy’s Show is a series of triprtychs where the artist shows photographs of concentration camp victims, jeery pictures of the Wehrmacht boys on the home front and pin-up postcards printed for the Wehrmacht. The artist comments with true quotes she gathered from WW2, Vietnam and Iraq veterans and their partners.
In project from that period, 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. Yet not an annihilated body. A body that wants and desires. That loves. A body outside the limits of history. These words describe That You Have Someone, 2012, which can be seen as a summary of that period in Janich’s oeuvre.
The second period in her work commenced in 2013 and produced projects to which Love is central. Love full of emotions, constantly put to the test of mutual expectations and social norms regulating the lives of the partners. Each picture frame is juxtaposed with a short text – a handwritten quote both commenting on and completing the image.
This strategy is employed in I don‘t see the problem, 2011-2014. Both the visual and the textual layer of the work refer to common social cliches. Firstly, we have the female-male roles (he’s the macho hunter while she’s subjected to him; she’s beautiful while he’s strong). Then, the family roles (a picture of a young family with a Christmas tree, where the baby is, in fact, a doll) and „good advice“ passed onto our role models by people from their social circle.
In 2 minutes late, 2013, Agnes Janich faces the loss of a loved one, as well as the pain connected with death. A pain that can never be soothed by a second chance and never corrected by a better answer. At the same time, 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.
I don’t need, 2014 talks about absence as well. A photographic essay on loneliness, this series of questions asked in an image form leads to a twofold conculsion. Firstly, it’s a therapautic session, successfully handling the burden of one’s loneliness. Secondly, it’s an account of insecurity and fear faced by the main character.
Pink, 2015 is the most rococo project of Janich so far not only due to the abundance of flowers, frills and lace, as well as the omnipresent pink color. The role model here poses in a buduoir. She recalls the Japanese kawaii easthetic of cuteness and angelic prettiness, full of kiddie props: lollipops, baloons and even dresses that could belong to a presechool student.
The latest photographic cycles, completed in 2015, are full of emotions typical for shedding an old and beggining a new period of life. A pivotal point here is What if... – a deeply uncanny series of photographs, completed with Janich’s signature commentary. Its form mimicks that of a diary, a journal or private correspondence. It opens the door to an intimate world, as deeply personal as the images, both recalling a private archive and sublimely perfected in each minute detail. The subvertion of this series is in the questions the main character asks herself. Besides the typical fears and woes connected with meeting a new person and insecurity about their intentions, doubts refering to the potential behavior and feelings of the main character arise. For what can happen if I can count on you, If you’ll forgive me, If you won’t let me down, If you won’t betray me and will always have time for me? These questions may seem misplaced, but only at first sight. The artist draws our attention to the fact that even the happiness we dreamt up might turn out to be a nightmare...
Despite an obvious shift towards emotions and intimacy, presented by the artist with the deepest empathy and sensitivity, Agnes Janich remembers about the Annihilation. With Our Eyes Closed, 2008-2015, sources wartime archives, salvaging images that inmates took with them on their final journey. These images of bliss are juxtaposed with those from her family archive, a family always remembering the war that just took place. Janich erases the eyes in both her kindred images and those she saved from oblivion, depersonalizing the portrayed people, likening them to dolls, even. This time she revisits the topic, the artist broadens the references of the Annihilation. She perfectly shows just how contemporary it is in The Sound of Music, made of two parts. In the former, she cites music used in Guantanamo Bay torture cells, while in the latter, she employs music favored by the inafamous dr Mengele. The subversive title draws attention to wether music can really soothe the savage beast. It also questions the sensitivity, and even morality, of art lovers, as well as the therapeutic role of music itself.
The works of Agnes Janich has often been presented at both solo shows and group surveys of contemporary art. The artist presented her images at the Central European House of Photography in Bratislava, Slovakia [2007], the Galapagos Art Space in New York [2009], Museum of Contemporary Art MOCAK Krakow, Poland [2010], BWA Zielona Gora, Poland [2012], the MCCA Elektrownia in Radom [2012], Galerie Walter Keller in Zürich, Switzerland [2013]. She took part in presentations at the Maison Européene de la Photographie in Paris, France [2005], the show Ein gewisses jüdisches Etwas in the National Museum in Zürich, Switzerland [2007], the show All Creatures Great and Small, curated by Maria Brewińska in Zachęta, National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, Poland [2009], the Sharjah Biennial [2009], the show No more bad girls?, curated by Kathrin Becker, PhD and Claudia Marion Stemberger, PhD in the Kunsthalle Exnergasse in Vienna [2010], the Platform 2012 in the Fotomuseum in Winterthur, Switzerland [2012], as well as Gaze and Lust. Sexuality in Contemporary Art, curated by Eli Okkenhaug in the Kunstmuseum in Bergen, Norway [2012]. In 2012, Edition Fotohof, Salzburg, Austria together with MCCA Elektrownia published her monographic catalog Agnes Janich: Body Memory [ISBN 978-83-85901-91-4]. One of many anthologies of contemporary art that include Agnes Janich’s works is Becoming a Mother, edited by Ana Vilenica [2012]. Agnes Janich got numerous grants, among them from Polish Institutes and Embassies in Moscow, Bern, Vienna and Barcelona. She completed numerous artist’s residencies in Switzerland, the United States of America and Spain, among others. Agnes Janich is working with Galerie Walter Keller, Zürich, Switzerland and Galerie C in Neuchâtel near Geneva, Switzerland.