“Fleeting encounters, suggestive self-portraits, strange scenes: at first, Igor Pisuk’s series is difficult to connect to, leaving much space for free associations. The pictures create moods and sensations. Like single notes that produce a special melody when part of a series, they open up feelings the viewer needs to get in touch with” says curator Ulrich Rüter. Igor Pisuk’s first photograph in the Deceitful Reverence series was taken while he was in Lodz, Poland, shortly after returning from two months inside a closed institution to be treated for an alcohol addiction.
He developed his addiction while still in high school, and drank compulsively for nearly eight years. “After the treatment, I felt that I could start my life with a new beginning,” he said. “I started with taking pictures of my surroundings. It became my way to express my feelings, the chaos in my head…I started to use photography to visualise my loneliness, abandonment [and] love.”
He produced the series: a multi-layered story about loneliness and emigration, an individual’s look at the inner and outer world, and how they interact. Part poem, part diary and part therapy constructed via a commute between Poland and Sweden, where he moved to with his girlfriend, its raw depictions of his “visions, emotions [and] dreams from my past and present life” have since been published in numerous magazines and exhibited around the world.
Igor Pisuk, Poland
Chobi Mela IX International Festival of Photography in Bangladesh
February 3 to 16, 2017
Rd No. 8A
Dhaka 1209
Bangladesh
