Biographie
Masha Wysocka is a Belgian-Spanish artist who uses photography, performance, research, sound, and writing. She delves into stories from the peripheries and brings history and science to the forefront of her practice.
She holds an MA in photojournalism and documentary photography from London College of Communication - University of the Arts London. Moreover, she graduated from Sciences Po Strasbourg and has a BA in sociology from University of Strasbourg.
She is one of the recipients of the Mead Fellowship awarded by University of the Arts London in 2020. She won other scholarships in Europe, like PhMuseum 2023 Photography Grant - Residency Bursary at Landskrona Foto. She was selected for artist-in-residence programmes in Belgium, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden and Ukraine.
She took part in exhibitions in Portugal, Spain and the UK. Her project 'Truth is Stranger than Fiction' has been shown at Circulation(s) Festival 2024 in Paris.
Her work is part of the art collection at the Museum of the University of Alicante, Spain.
Présentation
The Truth is Stranger than Fiction project (2021-2024) tackles the themes of truth, lies and propaganda during the Cold War, while shedding light on the daily lives of people in Hungary under Communism.
The work was based on two different archive collections at the Blinken Open Society Archives (Budapest, Hungary). The first archive consists of vernacular photographs from the 1980s. The Hungarian state photographic laboratory, Főfotó, discarded or censored these photographs for technical or political reasons. The second archive comes from the Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty Research Institute. It consists of a series of "field reports" on Kafkaesque daily life in the 1950s. They were gathered from interviews with people who were originally from, or had access to, Communist Hungary.
During the research phase, the photographer examined 10,000 photographs from the Private Photo and Film Foundation and 3,500 "field reports" from the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Research Institute.