"Dominick 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." (Marta Raczek-Karcz, PhD)
"Her aim is not to remember but to prevent forgetting, to evoke the conditions of suffering and examine the consequences of ignorance." (Lyle Rexer, PhD, Aperture art critic)
"Upon seeing her images, we begin to relate. To feel. (...) We become the characters of the story." (Obieg, CCA Ujazdowski's magazine); "there was love in this hell. There was desire and there was sexuality." (Marta Raczek-Karcz, PhD); "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." (Marta Raczek-Karcz, PhD)
"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." (Obieg, CCA Ujazdowski's magazine)
"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." (Thyrza Nichols Goodeve, PhD, Artforum art critic)
"She found a way: herself. Making soaps out of her young 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 these moments any better. Love here is useless like a soul in Treblinka. // Choose the image with which you can identify. // Be surprised you're not in her place. // Maybe your soul will forgive you." (Professor Joanna Tokarska-Bakir)
"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. First of all, the events of the last century and its crimes, from the Holocaust through the Balkan wars and beyond, have made an imprint on the consciousness of everyone, so that the body and its pleasure cannot be a form of forgetting. Pleasure has a setting, a background, and for anyone these days the background is full of shadows.
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." (Lyle Rexer, PhD, Aperture art critic)
http://www.archivelikeyou.com/en/node/35708
http://photography-now.com/exhibition/88117
http://www.near.li/data/2018_06_mdl/next47_february13.pdf
https://en.mocak.pl/memory-is-freedom-freedom-in-the-body-patrycja-dolowy
http://strasznasztuka.blox.pl/2013/02/Artmix-wizualizacje-wojny.html