Alltagsfantasie (Everyday Fantasy)
Emerging from lived experience at the intersection of womanhood, motherhood, migration, and artistic resistance, this body of work traces a deeply personal journey of unlearning, healing, and reimagining. Rooted in Joanna Szproch’s life as a Polish woman shaped by conservative norms, later challenged by artistic freedom and personal trauma in Germany, the work spans over a decade (2010–2023, book format) and evolves into an immersive installation in 2025.
At its core lies a layered self-portrait constructed through photographs of Szproch herself, her muse, and her daughter, interwoven with childhood drawings and quiet ritualistic gestures. These elements form an intimate visual language that explores the undoing of patriarchal conditioning and the reclamation of female sensuality, autonomy, and joy. Photography becomes both a form of inner attunement and an embodied ritual—an opening toward sisterhood, healing, and transformation.
Cultural narratives are held up to scrutiny: those that have long shaped identity, imposed silence, and normalized shame. Inherited beliefs—passed on through generations—are confronted and contrasted with subconscious truths rooted in fantasy, curiosity, and intuitive knowledge. These alternative narratives offer tools for resistance and sovereignty: places where women are not merely expected to endure but allowed to thrive.
Having internalized obedience and self-denial under the weight of Polish conservatism, Szproch found new creative freedom abroad—but also encountered violence that awakened her to the deeper structures of patriarchal control. What began as survival gradually unfolded into a pathway of artistic and personal transformation. When her daughter, Lena Hulpowska Szulc, joined the process, the work grew into an intergenerational dialogue—of defiance, tenderness, and redefinition.
Now embodied as an installation, the work resists the neutrality of the white cube. It layers photography, drawing, collage, archival material, and performative gesture into a sensuous, constantly shifting landscape. Acts as subtle as placing golden stars on the wall become rituals of re-enchantment, echoing play, presence, and the quiet joy of being alive.
What ideas support connection and liberation? Which beliefs must be unlearned in order to move forward? No fixed answers are offered—only open invitations to witness, to remember, and to co-create beyond fear, silence, and separation.