18/04/2026
For EXPOSED Torino Photo Festival, Quartz Studio presented Otherwords by Anna Orlowska, part of the group exhibition Metamorphosis, curated by Giangavino Pazzola. The exhibition can be visited by appointment.
Otherworlds (2023–ongoing) is an exploration of the artist’s personal history and that of her family, as well as a field report of a fascinating journey suspended between reality and fiction, the ordinary and the dreamlike. The worlds of past and present coexist in parallel, beyond the structures of time, and intertwine in the place that connects them: the ancient Silesian village of Sandowitz, today Żędowice in Poland, around which several generations of the artist’s family gravitate. At the center of this microcosm is a 19th-century mill, once powered by the waters of the Mała Panew River, and the now-vanished village community. Orłowska evokes the mythical setting of the mill’s childhood years, which remained in her family’s possession for 120 years. The artist has listened to many stories about the site’s past life. In this realm, individuals could shape their own reality, using their strength and ingenuity while drawing on available analog technologies and adapting them to their needs. The rhythms of life were governed both by natural cycles and by the inner workings of the watermill.
Many of the works are characterized by a distinctive reddish hue. This red is due to iron deposits permeating the area surrounding the artist’s family home, including a stream fed by a spring in the nearby forest. As early as the Iron Age, the region encompassing Żędowice was a metallurgical area, rich in bog iron ore from which metal was extracted, and dotted with forests that provided raw material for charcoal production. Iron is not only the main component of steel—used by Orłowska in some of her latest works—but also a fundamental component of hemoglobin, which carries oxygen in the blood, giving it a decisive role in the development of life on Earth. Orłowska prints photographs onto fabric and then dyes the material by immersing it in an iron-rich suspension, transforming the image into a rust-red tone and thereby “developing” new visual properties. As the material is cut, torn, combined, sewn, woven, and draped, the photographic medium is once again transformed within her artistic practice.
Anna Orłowska (Opole, Poland, 1986) studied photography at the National Film, Television and Theatre School in Łódź and at the Institute of Creative Photography at the University of Silesia in Opava, and received the Photo Global scholarship at the School of Visual Arts in New York (2013). The artist uses photography to reveal hidden layers of history and its ideological conditioning, often absent from official narratives. By blending documentary and staging, she brings to light hidden myths and legends, deconstructing fantasies about the past and creating new constellations of meaning. Her photography-based objects challenge the boundaries of the medium. Orłowska considers photography a tool for exploring knowledge itself and a means of working with memory, which is inherently fragmentary. Her practice engages with historical spaces and the memory of places, seeking new ways to revitalize and reactivate them.
