What remains of the place we left behind?
Data publikacji:
None of the photographs were taken in Korea. And yet Korea is present in almost every frame. A year after Marina Pietrocoli and Mariam Giunashvili’s artist residencies in Wrocław, their photographs and the stories of the people they met return as part of the exhibition ‘Ordinary Distances’.
What remains of the place we have left behind? Is it possible to be far from home whilst still feeling close to it – in everyday gestures, flavours, objects and memories? These questions are addressed by the Italian photographer Marina Pietrocola and the Georgian photographer Mariam Giunashvili, whose work will be on display at GUA Collective this September.
The project is the result of artist residencies the artists undertook in Wrocław in 2025. Their starting point was the presence of the Korean community in Wrocław and Bielany Wrocławskie. Rather than attempting to create a comprehensive or representative portrait of this community, the photographers opted for more personal encounters – conversations, walks, visits to workplaces, restaurants, shops and other spaces of everyday life.
It was from these encounters that the photographs on display in the exhibition emerged. They are not an attempt to tell a single story or to encapsulate the experience of migration in a single image. Each artist observed the people she encountered from her own perspective. Marina Pietrocola directed her attention, amongst other things, towards architecture, landscape and personal histories, whilst Mariam Giunashvili focused on gestures, relationships and the atmosphere of the encounter. Their works differ, but together they form a narrative of attentively getting to know another person.
A year later
A year has passed since the end of the residency, but the stories that began then do not end with the artists’ departure. Ordinary Distances marks the next stage in this process – a return to the encounters, conversations and images that emerged in Wrocław.
None of the photographs on display were taken in Korea. And yet Korea is ever-present in them: in memory, language, food, daily rituals, work, relationships and objects. It is precisely this paradox that has become one of the project’s key themes. Distance need not mean absence. Sometimes a place thousands of kilometres away is part of the most ordinary moments of everyday life.
That is why, alongside the photographs, the exhibition will also feature personal objects linked to the stories of people the artist met during the residency. Borrowed or donated by members of the Korean community, they are not merely a complement to the photographs. Each has its own story and functions within the exhibition as an independent trace of someone’s presence.
It is also a way of shifting the perspective. Here, the community is not merely the subject of the photographs, but helps to shape the exhibition space. The juxtaposition of photographs and objects allows us to view the stories depicted in a more personal light – through the things that belong to specific people and that are part of their everyday lives.
Ordinary Distances
The exhibition’s title refers to the distance we recognise not only from the experience of migration. Each of us has our own distances – places we have left behind, people separated from us by time or space, memories that remain close to us.
Ordinary Distances does not attempt to measure or bridge these distances. Instead, it examines how distance becomes part of everyday life. How one can exist between places, languages and memories, whilst at the same time building a life here and now.
The exhibition is the result of a residency organised by the Wrocław Institute of Culture as part of the international platform Magic Carpets, in collaboration with GUA Collective. Sangmin Cha and Paulina Brelińska-Garsztka are responsible for the curatorial preparation of the exhibition. The residencies were accompanied by photographer Wojciech Chrubasik, who documented the artists’ joint walks and field visits and supported the project’s development.
As early as September, visitors will be able to see the results of this work – photographs and objects that tell stories of places geographically distant, yet present in ordinary, everyday situations.
- Opening: 1 Septmeber 2026, 6:00 PM
- GUA Collective, Ruska 46A/9, Wrocław
- Exhibition: 1–13 September 2026
