Building trust through the lens – Mariam Giunashvili’s residency

Disposable cameras, daily rituals, and building relationships between two seemingly distant worlds—this is how the photographic stories of the Korean community in Wrocław were created, documented by a Georgian photographer as part of the Magic Carpets residency.

Mariam Giunashvili, a resident of the Magic Carpets program, who completed her residency at the Wrocław Institute of Culture in September, bases her artistic practice on building relationships, mindfulness, and collaborative processes. Her psychological education has deepened her creative intuition, directing it towards building narratives rooted in social experience and sensitivity shared with others, especially friends and people from her immediate environment. Mariam is an activist, and photography is often a tool of resistance for her. It is therefore not surprising that her reportages consist of many photographs, which she intuitively organizes and arranges into various aesthetic configurations in the form of collages or photographic constellations. In Wrocław, she also managed to test a new form of expression.

One of the key elements of her practice, already evident in her earlier artistic work, is the need to give a voice to people who are overlooked on a daily basis or who function on the margins of dominant narratives. Its origins can be found in her experiences of nightlife in Tbilisi, the city where the Georgian artist works as a bartender. It was there that she first realized that photography could be a tool for empowering those whose stories rarely find a place in the public sphere.

Her residency in Wrocław provided an opportunity to create a project focusing on the Korean community living in the city and the surrounding Bielany Wrocławskie district. It is worth noting that the Korean community in Wrocław is one of the most dynamically developing migrant groups in the region. It is estimated that several thousand people of Korean origin live in the city and its surroundings, a significant proportion of whom are families associated with large companies operating in Lower Silesia, such as LG Solutions. Their growing presence can also be seen in the landscape of newly opened restaurants and shops, created by people who have decided to settle permanently in Poland. Events dedicated to the Korean community have also begun to appear in the cultural landscape, such as the Kimchi Festival, which took place at the Wrocław airport. However, the community remains largely invisible in the context of other activities taking place in the city. The Mzesu project has therefore become an act of restoring this visibility, a real gesture towards bringing the two cultures closer together.

As part of the project, the Georgian artist proposed a form of cooperation in which joint practices and mutual cultural exchange play a key role. Those involved in the project received disposable Kodak cameras along with instructions encouraging them to document their everyday lives. The photos were to depict ordinary moments: commuting to work, meetings, travels, shopping, family, home interiors, and businesses. The artist wanted the material to be authentic and honest, deliberately unprofessional, recorded from the perspective of those who form an invisible community on a daily basis. During her residency, the artist developed all the photos and asked each participant to create their own album depicting their individual relationship with Korean culture. This material served as a visual collage illustrating everyday life in Wrocław. Each book is a story that unfolds slowly and has blank pages that can be filled in the future.

At the same time, it turned out that the project opened up to previously unforeseen themes. For example, one of the participants, Nikola, who works at the Korean cosmetics store Aura3AM, traveled to Korea for the first time in her life during Mariami’s residency and agreed to document the trip. Another example was a Korean woman, the owner of the Girumi bakery, who shared photos from her visit to Korea, also taken with a camera gifted by the artist. Thanks to this, the project unexpectedly began to include a dialogue between two everyday lives, Wrocław and Seoul.

The albums tell a story of experiencing migration, intermediate states, and moments of suspension between the home that has been left behind and the home that is being rebuilt elsewhere. That is why the experience of the project’s co-curator, Sangmin Cha, proved particularly important in the context of this project. The Korean artist has been living in the UK for several years. During her curatorial research in Wrocław, she met people who face similar challenges, which proved to be an added value to the artist residency. As the project turned out to be a very complex process and even an artistic challenge, a project team was formed, consisting of two curators—Paulina Brelińska-Garsztka and the aforementioned Sangmin Cha— two Magic Carpets residents, Mariami Giunashvili and Marina Pietrocola, and coordinator Jutrzenka Duchnowska, who contacted representatives of the Korean community and, step by step, built mutual trust, on which the individual photography projects were based.

Mariami Giunashvili’s residency proved that photography can bring together people who, in other circumstances, might never have had the opportunity to meet or photograph each other, and thus actively participate in an artistic project. In this context, the residency in Wrocław became an opportunity for the artist to tell this story. The project, which she co-created with Marina Pietrocola, not only allowed her to enter the reality of the Korean diaspora, but also opened up space for creating relationships that had previously been lacking in the city. One of the project participants admitted that no one in Poland had ever approached her with a proposal for artistic collaboration, which drew attention to a significant cultural barrier resulting from both the hierarchical structure of Korean society and the language barrier (many Koreans living in Poland speak only Korean and basic English). The research and creative work carried out by both artists is not limited to a single residency season. Rather, it is the beginning of a larger story about Polish-Korean cooperation in Wrocław, which, thanks to the experience gained, trust, and mutual understanding, will be able to develop further, also thanks to local partners, including the Lower Silesian Public Library, local businesses involved in the project, and the substantive support of the University of Wrocław.

Paulina Brelińska-Garsztka

• Artist: Marina Pietrocola
• Curators: Paulina Brelińska-Garsztka, Sangmin Cha 
• Partners: Lower Silesian Public Library, Szymon Maraszewski, Martyna Wyleciał (Azjatycka Półka), Marta Niewiadomska (Pani od koreańskiego), Oseyo 25, Bingsu House, Aura3AM, ManiToGo, Seoul97 Cafe, Darea, Fathers’ Kitchen, Ottugi – Asian Food, Piekarnia Girumi, U&I Mart, Secret Garden. 

WIK is a partner of the international Magic Carpets platform, co-financed by the European Union’s Creative Europe program, which brings together more than a dozen cultural organizations.