Ania Ready

Hysterical Women

This body of work is a visual response to a literary text of the same title written by a forgotten trilingual writer of Polish origin Sophie Gaudier-Brzeska (1872-1925) who died in a mental asylum in the UK. The unpublished novel tells a story of a migrant woman from Galicia, Eastern Europe who travels west to Paris, New York and London to find employment, and more importantly to fulfill her creative ambitions of becoming a writer. The rigid rules of patriarchal society, lack of opportunities for women, poverty and disillusionment lead to her mental instability – to hysteria as it was called at the time. Ania Ready uses the performative aspect of this condition to speak out about the tragedy of talented but unfulfilled women for whom madness was the only way out of a miserable life. Through enactment and staging she recreates the extreme emotions brought out by extreme living conditions, and expresses them in black and white photographs. Her subtle, meditative take on female vulnerability challenges the historical, photographic accounts of female hysterics typically exploited photographically by male medics.

Ania Ready

Ania Ready is a photographic artist of Polish origin based in the UK since 2004. She came to photography from a literary background, having studied Polish and English literature at the University of Gdansk, Poland. Her work centres around notions of belonging and alienation, memory and amnesia, mental fragility and poetics of existence. Ania has exhibited her work internationally in group and solo shows at Modern Art Oxford, Pitt Rivers Museum, Glasgow Gallery of Photography, UK, Humanit'Art Gallery in Switzerland, LoosenArt in Italy, Auckland Photo Festival in New Zealand, Riga Photomonth in Latvia.

Exhibition Availability

The Youth Community Centre, 79A Warszawska Street. The exhibition is open to the public until 22.10.2021, Mon-Fri, 9:00-19:00, also 25-26.09.21, 10:00-16:00