Joanna Zylinska, Will You Ever Go Back?


Joanna Zylinska, ‘Will You Ever Go Back?’

Joanna Zylinska has been living in the UK for nearly 15 years. Dwelling on the question she regularly gets asked, by Brits and Poles alike, ‘Will You Ever Go Back?’, for the project presented here she revisits her Polish home town in search of the ghosts of the past. This memory trip leads to some further questions: What does it mean to want to return home? Or not to want to, for that matter? What do we take with us when we leave? What do we leave behind? Most importantly, is there much point in talking about returning if we have not yet established whether ‘leaving home’ is ever even an option? It is the uncertainty of the response to these questions that the series presented here attempts to capture.

British theorist of Caribbean origin Stuart Hall reflects on this vexed experience of leaving home in the following terms: ‘The classic questions which every migrant faces are twofold: “Why are you here?” and “When are you going back home?” No migrant ever knows the answer to the second question until asked. Only then does she or he know that really, in the deep sense, she/he’s never going back. Migration is a one-way trip. There is no “home” to go back to. There never was’. Zylinska’s exhibition is an attempt to stage this impossibility of capturing something that perhaps never was, at least not in any substantial and fixed way.

Joanna Zylinska is a writer, lecturer and photographic artist. She is Reader in New Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London. The author of books on a variety of cultural issues - from spiders and cyborgs to plastic surgery and bioart – she combines her theoretical writings with photographic practice. In her art work, Zylinska is particularly interested in the process of photographic mediation, and in reflecting, both practically and conceptually, on photography’s technical dimension.