In 2015, Joanna Piotrowska was photographing in Nagorno-Karabakh, a disputed territory within Azerbaijan, when she was apprehended by local police. Accused of spying for Russia, Piotrowska was subjected to intensive questioning that culminated in her interrogators’ demand that she continue her work to prove her innocence. Faced with the prospect of perpetual surveillance, Piotrowska turned her attention to roses, “the only safe subject,” as she’d later explain. In one print, part of the expansive installation Sub Rosa, 2022, a hand delicately cups a dark rose, a slightly stiff yet gentle gesture that evokes the artist’s better-known portraits. But the majority of the photographs produced are brooding, tenebrous prints that resemble Dutch still lifes.

In collaboration with the design studio Formafantasma, Piotrowska designed steel “anti-frame” devices to encase her photographs. Sub Rosa, the resulting site-specific installation, first exhibited at ARCH Athens and now at Phillida Reid in London, restrains rather than frames the images. Piotrowska’s photographs are, at various points, encased in an almost comically large steel matte, fastened to the floor with industrial clasps, and bolted to a glass panel that juts out of the wall like a waypost. In an adjacent room, a long strip of steel traces the perimeter of the space, bisecting the doorframes and pinning down the tops of several large prints, which curl slightly upward at the unanchored edges.

Piotrowska’s choice of subject was itself a subversive act, albeit one explicitly intended to portray her work as apolitical to her interlocutor. Indeed, the exhibition’s title, Latin for “under the rose,” signals the artist’s attempts to undercut existing power structures. Her decision to photograph roses, an enduring symbol of socialist and antiauthoritarian causes, is a resonant one. Under her careful hand, the flowers become indexes of trauma, signs of resistance and resilience in a region still fractured by the aftershocks of the Soviet Union’s collapse.

— Jonah Goldman Kay