Katerina Kouzmitcheva : Przepraszam za brak kontaktu / Sorry for the Lack of Contact

Opening: Wednesday, 24th of June, 2026, at 7:00 p.m. at Gallery Photon. 

The project Sorry for the Lack of Contact (2024 – ongoing) by Polish photographer Katerina Kouzmitcheva is presented as a multilayered photographic narrative about alienation and emotional exhaustion within intimate relationships. Working at the intersection of documentary and artistic photography, Kouzmitcheva develops a visual language in which lived experience and constructed imagery are inseparably intertwined. Her practice reflects on how material and immaterial boundaries, spatial, political, and psychological, shape the ways individuals move through environments, relationships, and inner states, while also influencing collective modes of understanding and feeling. In this series, the personal narrative becomes an entry point into the broader conditions of contemporary life, where closeness and distance, as well as presence and withdrawal, often coexist within the same moment. The work continues her ongoing artistic engagement with themes of memory, gender, and identity, while at the same time drawing attention to more intimate registers of experience. It explores vulnerability, femininity, and feelings of loss, moving between the personal and the political without separating the two.

The images in the series emerged from a state of emotional instability connected to the experience of separation, the breakdown of relationships, and the pressures of maintaining connection within the fragmented and overstimulated environments of contemporary life. At the same time, they reflect the feeling that communication in such circumstances becomes uncertain, while silence acquires the same weight as speech. The analog imperfections visible in many of the photographs, such as blurriness, light leaks, and scratches, do not function as aesthetic additions, but rather as narrative elements reflecting these emotional fractures. Direct gazes, withdrawn figures, and self-reflexive compositions further convey inner states and tensions. Ultimately, Sorry for the Lack of Contact presents intimacy as something unstable, as a process shaped by memory and shifting forms of relationships, articulated through the artist’s distinctive photographic language.

Katerina Kouzmitcheva (1981, Belarus) is a Polish photographer of Belarusian origin based in Wrocław, Poland. Working at the intersection of documentary and art photography, she explores visible and invisible boundaries, geographical, ideological, psychological, shaping lives and collective attitudes. Her practice addresses migration, systems of control, memory, gender, identity, while also engaging vulnerability, femininity, and loss.She holds a BA in Business Law, then later studied at Fotografika in Saint Petersburg, and earned MFA and PhD in Fine  Arts from Eugeniusz Geppert Academy in Wrocław. She is studying at the Institute of Creative Photography in Opava.

She is a recipient of the Gaude Polonia scholarship and international awards including Tokyo International Photo Awards, Budapest International Photo Awards, Sarajevo Photography Festival winner in conceptual category, and Urbanautica Institute portfolio winner (2024–2025). Nominated for Leica Oskar Barnack Award and Foam Paul Huf Award. She is a member of Women Photograph. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including Les Rencontres d’Arles and Tallinn Photomonth, across Europe, Asia, and South America. Her photography has appeared in publications such as British Journal of Photography, Bird in Flight, and The Wall Street Journal.