The negative from which all 365 prints were exposed.
No Words – The Darkroom as Shelter
began on 24 February 2022, the day Russia invaded Ukraine.
For 365 consecutive days, I went down every day to a makeshift darkroom in my basement and repeated the same photographic gesture. Each day I exposed the same negative: a woman’s hands holding a blank sheet of paper.
Each print was numbered by hand on the already exposed but still undeveloped photographic paper using a brush dipped in photographic fixer.
During development, I deliberately exposed selected prints to white light, creating solarisation—moments in which positive and negative merge into one another.
The prints were intentionally left unfixed. They never reached a final state. Light, air, touch and time continue to transform them to this day. Each print remains as unstable as the event to which it responds.
The improvised darkroom in the basement.
What began as a response to war gradually became a daily ritual. The darkroom turned into a place where repetition gave structure to time. Photography was no longer about making pictures, but about returning to the same gesture every day under constantly changing circumstances.
Day 307. Damaged during exhibition.
From that moment on, every presentation becomes part of the work. Light and every new exhibition context continue to transform the photographs.
Damage and theft are not reversed either. In autumn 2023, several prints disappeared from an unattended exhibition. Their absence remains visible and has become part of the work itself.
Installation view, 2023. 365 unfixed contact prints, ranging in size from 13 × 18 cm to 18 × 24 cm. Overall dimensions: approximately 250 × 400 cm.
No Words is not a series of finished photographs. It is an ongoing photographic process in which repetition creates order while time continuously transforms and questions that order.
Installation view, Fiksacje, Kraków, Autumn 2025. Due to limited exhibition space, all prints were mounted on a single nail. Photo: Bizarro Studio.
The story behind the project is available on Medium:
→ No Words — The Darkroom as Shelter
→ Three Concepts Manifesting Differently Across Exhibition Contexts
