Kine Michelle Bruniera

Norwegian-French photographer and artist who currently lives in Oslo, Norway. She works with documentary, but often draws inspiration from other techniques and genres. Her artistic practice derives from personal experience, and primarily explores insecurity, vulnerability and fears.

She is particularly interested in the debate between heritage and DNA, and recognizing the mutual influence of generations. All of this has a strong influence on Kine’s work and consequently manifests itself in a combination of documentary photography, archival images, installations and sound.

Summary of the residency

The optics of Kine’s project have somewhat shifted in the course of her residency. Initially, it was intended to address the situation of the LGBTQ+ community in Poland, as well as people who have experienced abortion. Gradually, however, the artist’s focus narrowed, and she concentrated on researching the church’s influence on Polish morality and abortion laws. While listening to stories about abortion, she noticed how something that should be personal was dependent on other people’s worldviews and external regulations, and how individual fates were strongly linked to politics and doctrine. She also traced the evolution that Poland has undergone from a country at the forefront of granting voting rights to women, to a country with a particularly restrictive abortion law.

Workshop

The artist divided her time between working at the desk, in search of materials and contacts, and roaming the city with her camera, observing the passers-by, often striking up conversations with the people she met. She used her gathered stories, information, and inspiration to build a visual narrative. In it, we will find pieces of biographies, legal and moral norms, cultural and social frameworks, or the constraints they create. While in Wrocław, Kine was also looking for visual representations of the issues she was interested in. She noticed the particularly intense, from her point of view, presence of religious symbols, which became the dominant theme in her photographs. The paths, both the physical and metaphorical ones, that people who want to terminate their pregnancies in Poland have to take, also turned out to be an important trope. In parallel, the residency became an opportunity for the artist to review her own photographic archive, which she examined from a different perspective than before, discovering its potential for use in a new project.