edyta

Edyta Majewska (born 1970) is a British-Polish artist working primarily in the field of moving-image documents and photographic installations. Her practice investigates issues around movement and migration in the UK from the perspectives of migrant workers in Scotland whose lives fall into social transparency due to level of employment, limited upward social mobility and Brexit’s tightening policies on immigration. The existence of these particular social group become politicised precisely because of their externally imposed invisibility. Majewska’s biopolitical approach to her documentary practice exposes the contestation of many educated Eastern European immigrant workers in Scotland in quotidian dealings with racial prejudice, circumscribed depravity in employment opportunities, and lack of cultural integration and acceptance.

Using intimate ditigal documentations as her fundamental research medium, Majewska directs the gaze of the camera to make visible the political importance of the everyday in lives of those whose living standard will continue to be jeopardized and whose social invisibility will intensify further under protocols of Brexit. Her archives are edited by amplification, multiplication, or reduction into collaged testaments that are reminiscent of the very fabrication of daily life. Majewska’s uses her materials to recreate immersive domestic spaces that narrate, on a very personal level, limitations of life improvement for low-employment alien workers, specifically within the Eastern European diaspora, in Scotland. At the same time, it underlines the heartbreaking reality of immigration for the many who in hope for a better life find themselves in socio-financial atrophy, their voices muffled and their dreams held unapproacheable at an armslength by unpenetrable racial class division.

Surrounding her visual narratives in dialogue with Brexit and the UK’s regression into convervative politics, Majewska’s working method is a constant oscillation between the real and the abstract, the private and the public. She aims to create an alternative existence which resonates the silenced political voices of those subjected to debasory mode of social classification. Having attained her BA in Photography from the Glasgow School of Art in 2015, Edyta Majewska now lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland.