Not Your Choice

2025

Alltagsfantasie Recycled / NOT YOUR CHOICE!

Group Exhibition, A.K.T!, Pforzheim, DE, 2025

After publishing her debut monograph Alltagsfantasie in 2023, Szproch spent over a year trying to exhibit the work — without success. Grants fell through, and production costs for a large solo show were out of reach. Rather than wait, she turned the situation into a method: using the worn preview copy of the book itself as raw material, she began cutting, layering, and reassembling its pages into collages. No new budget required — only the object already in her hands. The process became more than a workaround. The wear and tear of the book — its creased pages, its history of use — entered the work. New meaning emerged from existing images: the same photographs, reframed, started to say something different.

When curator Janusz Czech invited her to the group exhibition NOT YOUR CHOICE! in Pforzheim, Szproch expanded this series into large-format prints, filling all floors of the venue. The show addressed the conservative backlash against gender equality — how laws, social norms, and cultural expectations continue to treat women's bodies as contested ground. Her collages, now monumental in scale, became a feminist and autobiographical rereading of her own archive: a survivor's reclamation of joy as resistance, and a refusal to accept pain as a condition of womanhood.

The collages carry a clear message: women are permitted to serve, but forbidden to speak — conditioned to love, but rarely to be loved. Rooted in Szproch's own experience of domestic abuse, the work transforms private history into a political statement, exposing how systems protect perpetrators while punishing those who survive them. Drawing on the Polish tradition of subversive art, she confronts her own silencing within patriarchal structures. For Szproch, collage is not only a method but a manifesto: born of constraint, improvisation, and the refusal to be erased.

In the chapel space, her artist's book was placed on the pulpit — thirteen years of work, given the weight of a sacred object. For the finissage, Szproch and her daughter Lena led a participatory workshop, Fantasizing in Our Hood — an act of intergenerational imagination.

Die Scham Muss Die Seite Wechseln

2024

DIE SCHAM MUSS DIE SEITE WECHSELN / Shame Must Change Sides
Polaroid performance, 2024

Presented: Wahre Liebe Tut Niemals Weh, 2024 / NOT YOUR CHOICE!, A.K.T!, Pforzheim, DE, 2025
In 2024, Szproch and her daughter carried a mattress to a park in their Berlin neighborhood. On it, she had inscribed the words of Gisèle Pelicot — the French survivor who, while her husband's trial was still ongoing, stood before the world and said: Shame must change sides. Szproch photographed herself next to it.

The impulse was personal. Szproch and her daughter have lived with the consequences of domestic abuse — a violence that never touches only one person. Children carry what their parents survive.

The mattress they carried to the park was her daughter's — the one she slept on. That is not a neutral detail. Pelicot was raped in her sleep, in her own bed, by the man she trusted. The mattress is where women are most vulnerable: asleep, unaware, trusting. It is precisely this entitlement to a woman's body in her most unguarded state that the performance names. Pelicot's case is not exceptional. The practice of drugging or waiting for women to sleep before assaulting them is increasingly documented — and it points to the same logic: a belief that women's bodies are available regardless of consent.

For Szproch, Pelicot is also a symbol of refusal. She did not accept the role of victim. She stepped out of the narrative designed to contain her, returned responsibility to the perpetrator, and said, "The shame is not mine to carry." The performance echoes that refusal. Shameless joy is a form of resistance — a rejection of double standards, victim-blaming, and the systems that protect perpetrators while retraumatizing those who survive them. Women are not martyrs. They are entitled to thrive.

The performance is also a confrontation with systemic failure. Despite a conviction, the law continues to protect the perpetrator's identity. Szproch may describe what happened to her, but she cannot name who did it. This legal asymmetry does not protect survivors; it re-enacts the original harm, placing the burden once again on those who were never responsible for what was done to them. Shame, the work insists, belongs elsewhere.

Materials: Polaroid photographs, mattress, text sprayed on.

Wahre Liebe Tut Niemals Weh

2024

WAHRE LIEBE TUT NIEMALS WEH / Real Love Never Hurts
Solo Exhibition, Rathaus Neukölln, Berlin, DE, 2024
In collaboration with StoP – Neighborhood Without Domestic Violence e.V.

In 2024, Szproch brought her practice out of the gallery and into the street. At a neighborhood festival in Neukölln, she photographed volunteers holding or wearing empowering slogans against domestic violence — some inscribed directly onto skin. Her daughter Lena worked alongside her as a makeup artist and co-author of the slogans, making visible what is often invisible: that children, too, live with the consequences of domestic abuse. Every participant received a print to take home — the action continued beyond the festival, carried into private spaces by the people who had chosen to be part of it.

The collaboration was with StoP, an initiative that mobilizes residents to actively support those affected by domestic violence in their immediate surroundings. The project's premise: domestic violence is not a private matter. Neighbors, witnesses, and bystanders are not neutral — they can choose to stand with survivors rather than look away.
Selected photographs were enlarged and exhibited at Rathaus Neukölln, a civic institution deliberately chosen over a gallery space. For Szproch, showing this work in a public building was itself a statement.

The collaboration also exposed a structural contradiction that Szproch did not expect from an organization working specifically against domestic violence. She was asked to speak publicly about her experience — and did so, with courage — but without the basic conditions that trauma-informed practice requires. The principle is straightforward: organizations that work with survivors must actively resist retraumatization, not merely avoid causing obvious harm. When that does not happen, the burden falls, once again, on the person who was already harmed.

Perpetrators remain protected. Survivors do the work, absorb the cost, and are left to recover on their own. Szproch's willingness to be vulnerable became, in the end, the resource the project consumed. That, too, is part of the record.

A collaboration with StoP – Neighborhoods Without Domestic Violence, the Frauen in Neukölln network, and the Equal Opportunities Commissioner. Supported by "Partnerschaft und Demokratie Neukölln" within the federal programme "Demokratie leben!" (Democracy Alive!).

Lust Auf Urlaub

2024

LUST AUF URLAUB / Naherholungsgebiet Gropiusstadt
Editorial Photography, Collaboration with Kunst Werk Stadt Berlin, DE, 2024

In the summer of 2024, Szproch collaborated with Kunst Werk Stadt Berlin — an artists' collective working at the intersection of art, urban ecology, and public space — on a week-long workshop with children from Gropiusstadt, a residential district in Berlin's southern suburbs.

The project invited neighborhood children to rediscover their surroundings as a place of leisure and imagination. Together with the collective's artists, they designed deckchairs, printed cyanotypes, and built oversized wooden fans stretched with batik fabric — bringing a spirit of invented holiday into an everyday urban landscape.

The workshop ran for a week, during which the children built and assembled all the objects. Szproch joined on the final day — the moment of play, when everything came to life. Working alongside the collective's artists, she was also an animator, drawing out the children's natural instinct for performance and self-expression.

The resulting images are both staged and real: children caught in the act of dreaming, turning a city block into a summer escape. The series, titled Lust auf Urlaub, means a longing for a holiday, found right where you already are.

The project was developed in cooperation with the Bauhaus-Archiv / Museum für Gestaltung and the Evangelical Parish of Gropiusstadt, and supported by the Jugendkulturinitiative of the Berlin Senate Department for Culture.

Mäusebunker

2024

FANTASIZING IN OUR HOOD
Workshop, Mäusebunker Festival of City Wellbeing / Urbane Praxis, Berlin, DE, 2024

In 2024, Szproch and her daughter, Lena Hulpowska Szulc, co-led a participatory workshop at the Mäusebunker Festival of City Wellbeing — held inside Berlin's iconic brutalist landmark as part of the Urbane Praxis initiative, which promotes urban solidarity through artistic practice.

Participants of all ages were invited to transform into playful alter egos: crafting DIY costumes from colorful fabrics, recycled materials, glitter, wigs, and body paint, then photographing each other on instant Polaroid film. The costume, the mask, the make-up — these are not decorative objects but powerful devices capable of transforming reality. In the carnivalesque tradition, disguise is not escapism: it is a tool for revealing what everyday social roles conceal, for trying on new ways of being, and for building the kind of bonds that only emerge when people allow themselves to be seen differently. Each Polaroid became a tangible object — a small, physical proof that the transformation had happened, something to take home.

The workshop was rooted in a democratic idea: that artistic creation does not belong only to trained artists or institutional spaces. Everyday materials, collective imagination, and the simple act of dressing up together are enough to produce something genuinely spectacular. In a city where anonymity can quietly erode the connective tissue of community, and where urban life can harden people against softness and play, the workshop offered a temporary but real antidote. Gentleness, silliness, and joy are not trivial — they are a form of immunity, a way of keeping community alive.

This workshop also marks a new phase in Szproch's practice: her daughter Lena is no longer only a subject or collaborator on individual projects, but a co-author and co-facilitator. Together they form a working team, bringing an intergenerational perspective to participatory work and modeling the kind of creative partnership the workshops themselves invite. Lena contributes her own voice and presence; their collaboration has become its own ongoing work.

Materials: colorful fabrics, recycled materials, glitter, wigs, body paint, instant Polaroid photography.

gemeinsam anders

2023

GEMEINSAM ANDERS SEIN / Being Different Together
Participatory Photo Project, Wilde Hütte / Berlin Mondiale, Gropiusstadt, Berlin, DE, 2023
Presented: Apfelsinenplatz Festival, Berlin, DE, 2023 / Kunst und Kooperation in der Gropiusstadt, Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin, DE, 2025

In 2023, Szproch led a participatory photography project with girls aged 8–12 from Gropiusstadt, as part of Berlin Mondiale's Call for Solidarity — an open call for artists working in the context of asylum, exile, and migration across Berlin, exploring what it means to live and create together in the city.

Under the motto Gemeinsam Anders Sein — Being Different Together — the girls designed DIY costumes, used body paint, glitter, wigs, and photographed one another in instant analog portraits. The process expanded into collage, drawing, and painting. Decisions about what to make, keep, and show were made collectively. Solidarity here was not a theme but a method — the understanding that differences enrich rather than divide, practiced session by session.

The Polaroid sits at the heart of the project's logic. Unlike digital images, an instant photograph is unrepeatable — a physical object that carries the moment it was made and the presence of everyone in the group. The girls' portraits became an archive of encounters: displayed on an interactive wall, collaged, and compiled into a Leporello publication co-curated with Szproch. Participants said that through this work they realized joy and play were also theirs, not just duties. Some connections endured beyond the project.

The work was first shown publicly at the Apfelsinenplatz festival, where it inaugurated the Call for Solidarity alongside all participating projects. In 2025, it traveled to the Bauhaus-Archiv für Kunst und Kooperation in der Gropiusstadt — a group exhibition making visible what community art practice actually involves. The project continues to find new contexts — participatory work does not end when the workshop does.

Artistic direction Joanna Szproch. Created collectively with the participants of Wilde Hütte, Gropiusstadt: Adrianna, Alyye, Asma, Hanna, Hasna, Joanna, Lena, Lina, Marleen, Maria, Nissanur, Sena, Sheretta, Tajala, Tiffany, Tuvana, Zara, Zehra.

Alltagsfantasie

2023/26

Spanning 2010–2023 (photo-artbook) and evolving into an immersive installation in 2025, Alltagsfantasie (Everyday Fantasy) is Joanna Szproch’s layered self-portrait across time — a complex universe built through photographic performances, images with her muse, and her daughter’s drawings, challenging Catholic norms and patriarchal conditioning. Situated between Slavic romanticism and Prussian rigidity, Szproch carved out a liminal space of fantasy — a shared refuge where she explores female wonder, joy, and sovereignty.

Photography becomes both ritual and relationality: with herself through introspection, with her muse through sisterhood, and with her daughter through intergenerational dialogue. This network of images, objects, and bodies — carriers of memory and affect — creates meaning through juxtaposition. Szproch, raised under conservative Polish norms, moved to Berlin, the multicultural art mecca, with her daughter Lena, seeking a better life and freedom from suffocating Catholic expectations.

The migration was challenging, but it allowed them to craft a universe of joy, beauty, and wonder within the liminal space of fantasy. These elements are essential for human well- being but are often denied to women, who are expected to nurture others at their own expense. Healing begins from within, and self-awareness is a radical act. Fantasy serves as a playful form of resistance against oppressive systems — daily acts of curiosity and play become gestures of defiance. Almost 10 years after #MeToo, anti-feminist forces still deny women’s humanity while the extreme Christian right rises toward fascism.

Alltagsfantasie insists on the recognition of women’s inner life as a fundamental dimension of human existence. What remains invisible within social structures—female introspection, curiosity, or desire—should be examined first and foremost from the inside. Womanhood can only be understood from within its core, and the experience is a form of knowledge, not a withdrawal into the private. Although rooted in personal experience, it addresses universal human rights to self-determination, joy, and self-realization.

“I penetrate with curiosity
my infinite Alltagsfantasie
that resonates with my true self.
This allows me to live authentically
despite illusionary appearances.
Life is a miraculous mystery.“

Values such as altruism, care, and devotion are human, not feminine; the same goes for the need for joy, wonder, sovereignty, and interpersonal resonance, which belong to personhood, not to gender. Szproch shows that well-being is essential for responsibility and care. Restoring women’s inner autonomy is a cultural necessity that links inner freedom and collective health.

“Some people say I have my head in the clouds. For me, it’s all true. Live your fantasy and do not let illusions trick you."

Buy the book online: https://www.andrefrereditions.com/en/books/photography/alltags-fantasie/

Awards
Dummy Award, Fotofestiwal Łódź, PL, 2022
Star Dummy Award Nominee, ES, 2022
Catalog Funding, Stiftung Kunstfonds, DE, 2022
Catalog Funding, Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe, DE, 2023
FEP Award, IT, 2024
Photo Publication of the Year, Fotofestiwal Łódź, PL, 2024

Exhibitions
Photo Book Reading Room, Mine Eyes Bees Deceive, cur. Kamila Bondar & Łukasz Rusznica, Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw, PL, 2024
PrzeglądAnie (się), cur. Joanna Kinowska, Laboratorium Sztuki, Kalisz Biennale of Art, PL, 2025
Tracing Solidarity, cur. O & Sharmila Sharma, Let's Unsettle / Gallery Grolman, DE, 2024
NOT YOUR CHOICE!, cur. Janusz Czech, A.K.T!, Pforzheim, DE, 2025
Feelings and Photography, cur.Jan Borreck Internationale Photoszene Köln, DE, 2025
IMPA — International Photography and Media Art Festival, Kaunas, LT, 2025
Circulation(s) — Festival of Young European Photography, cur. Carine Dolek, 104 Paris, FR, 2026

Lena

coming soon

I have been photographing my daughter since she was born and our remarkable relationship. I observe her transformation into a woman and her search for her own identity, separating herself from me as an independent individual with her own agency. We play at taking pictures and she, more than once witnessing my photo shoots, plays the role of a model and impersonates characters she creates herself. In the process, we balance on the verge of making testimony and creation.

Jason Honea

coming soon

Jason Honea hails from Northern California's Santa Clara Valley and calls Berlin, San Francisco, San Jose, and Santa Cruz home. He's a rocker, performer, singer, sayer, painter, drawer, and prayer. In an attempt to find out what works about music he straddles history and the lives of the saints to invoke atmosphere, redemption, and quest in an ever evolving exercise in fun and beauty.

I photograph Jason as my friend and a Californian punk-rocker. We shared a flat and now we are best buddies.

Bodywholeness

2019

The title BODYWHOLENESS was created by combining the words body and whole, in a synthetic way it refers to the issues of the project. It is an attempt to think of man as a holistic being, in which carnality is inseparably intertwined with the soul and mind. Such an attitude is important, especially today, when busy with everyday life, overwhelmed by media messages, bombarded by visual stimuli, we forget about the body, we think only about its external surface – its appearance. We cease to be in the body, to be the body, to be the BODYWHOLENESS. Is it possible to take at least a small step to be closer to the body, as it used to be?

bibgul

2016-2018

The photo project portraying Bibgul who calls herself an Experimental Amateur Exhibitionist/ Filmmaker/ Famous Dancer / Percussionist /Sexy
Hat / Fashion Designer. Her child-like yet provocative charisma inspired both artists to have together several shootings over a period of 2 years. To disobey the fashion industry’s snobiety and fakeness, they developed a rough and controversial DIY working style and Szproch with a sense of irony decided to finish a project in the form of a glamorous magazine mock-up in an edition of 10 copies.

Berlin Wunderland

2017

Berlin, the mecca of art, happens to become my home, where I meet colorful creative personalities. They have liberated themselves from the traditional canon and indulge in the experimentation of creation with childlike enthusiasm. In the spirit of the photography series resulting from our encounters, I am developing its continuation for publication at the special request of the Art Issue of 4SEE Magazine.

house of doll

2017

SOPHIE SONI is a multidisciplinary artist and founder of HOUSE OF DOLL. Her mixed media collages range from wearable art pieces to site-specific junk installations and sculptures. Scouring abandoned spaces and exploring the obsessive nature of material object attachment and collection, all resources used in her work are reclaimed rubbish without exception.

An editorial and a live shooting performance collaboration with House of Doll at Neurotitan, January 2017, Berlin, DE
The intermedial action between a performer Bibgul and a photographer Joanna Szproch is the result of a meeting between the medium of instant photography with the art of performance. Photographer captures the performer’s exhibitionism balancing somewhere between girly-infantile and slutty-vulgar.
Performance is a part of Rubbish Fairy’s installation House of Doll.

hanne lippard

2016

Hanne Lippard, born in 1984 in Milton Keynes, GB, lives and works in Berlin. Lippard’s practice explores the voice as a medium. Her education in graphic design informs how language can be visually powerful; her texts are visual, rhythmic, and performative rather than purely informative, and her work is conveyed through a variety of disciplines, which include short films, sound pieces, installations, and performance.

liina nillson

2016

Liina Nilsson is a Swedish artist based in Berlin and travels a lot, working in the mediums of painting, video, and writing. She is also an illustrator, editor, and director in the same mediums, an organizer, multiple designer, sometime singer, oft a builder, always a worker. She also runs a video art label called "Shocking Film", is one part of a duo "Nemesis" and a collective Pizza Suicide.

ballady i romanse for the lure film

2016

Ballady i Romanse is the band of two sisters Zuzanna and Barbara Wrońska who wrote the music and lyrics to the movie The Lure (Polish: Córki dancingu – "Daughters of Dancing"). This is a 2015 Polish horror musical film directed by Agnieszka Smoczyńska. The story is a reworking of the 1837 fairy tale "The Little Mermaid" by Hans Christian Andersen, with inspiration from sisters' experiences. After a Polish premiere, the film screened at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival and Fantasia Film Festival, to mixed reviews.

whitelies magazine

2016

An editorial for Whitelies Magazine - A collaboration with a makeup artist Jana Kalgajeva

lady gaby

2014

LADY GABY is a Berlin-based Australian spoken word and performance artist, creative writing, and projects coordinator as well as an event promoter, who has been involved in the international spoken word scene since the 90s. the organiser of Fuel, From the MOUTH OF DAMES, The Poetic Groove, lady gaby devotes energy in bringing poetry into the spotlight to make it 'COOL AND GROOVEY' to be performed at dance clubs, performance venues, and cultural festivals. She loves poets whose work is provocative, on the edge, and relevant to everyone around.

phil and monica

2014

Blending elements of lounge, surf, Latin, jazz, and wine music, Phil and Monica, featuring Leo 'Tormented Chilli Burger’, Mario ‘Crippled Pinhata’, ‘Fat Robocop’ and Matthew 'Steven Seagull', combines face-melting ukelele kitchen rock chopped and sauteed with heart-wrenching horns and mozzarella melting over thoughtful lyrics. A sonic adventure to a faraway South Pacific island.

prima facie

tarren johnson

2014

Tarren Johnson (b. 1990) is an American choreographer and artist based in Berlin.
She works with performance, video, sculpture, and writing.

artistic characters

2008-2014

a compilation of portraits of creative personalities based in Warsaw, NY, and Berlin, some of them I photographed for ID Poland in 2014 which featured Polish creatives living and working in Berlin

sound portraits

2011-2019

Portraits of musicians