Brave New World

What if there is no return to the life how you used to know before Covid struck? For a minute consider the possibility of the state continuing to model your social interactions, to prohibit you to gather in groups or to travel; to demand that you focus on the collective rather than individual good and to talk to you through televised speeches. How does it make you feel? Can you recognize the tyrannical ghost from behind the Iron Curtain spreading everywhere like a virus? In this series, the images from the Western lockdown realities have been juxtaposed with the archival photographs from the Eastern Bloc to create a dystopian vision of a new world with enforced social distancing rules and behavioural conditioning. The collages express the widely felt anxiety about the speed in which we lost our civil liberties and the ease in which we accepted to live under the draconian rules.

The first flashbacks from my childhood in communist Poland in the 1980s appeared after the first UK lockdown when I observed a long queue to the bank in Oxford's deserted city centre. I had been there before, surely. I was queueing with my grandma to the grocery shop. It was a long and painful process, and when we got to the counter what was left of that day’s daily supplies was only bottles of vinegar and one bar of chocolate. There was something tender in that memory – the joy of getting something, not going away empty-handed. There was also something terrifying in the striking moment of realisation that aspects of my life in the West had started evoking moments of life in a dysfunctional regime behind the Iron Curtain. This image became a catalyst for an outpouring of flashbacks.

Eastern Bloc - lockdown - Iron Curtain - tension - flashback - childhood - People's Poland - Western democracy - pandemic - tyranny - dystopia - control - regime - social order

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