THE ROBERT GIARD GRANT FOR EMERGING
LGBTQ+ PHOTOGRAPHERS

Zula Rabikowska, 2023 Finalist

Zula Rabikowska writes, “I am a Polish queer photographer and visual artist currently based in London. I was born in Poland, grew up in the UK and my experience of migration influences my practice. My projects explore migration, gender and LGBTQI+ communities with a focus on Central and Eastern Europe. My work unpicks the binary understanding associated with the “West” and the “East”. I work with multimedia, film, and photography, and incorporate archival images and documents to challenge conventional visual story-telling norms. I am interested in the collapse of the Soviet Regime and the dismantling of European colonial structure, and my last documentary project explores gender identity in Central and Eastern Europe, which I carried out by travelling for 5,000 miles along the former “Iron Curtain”. I hold a MRes in French Postcolonial Literature from the University of Warwick and an MA in Documentary Photography from the University of the Arts London. I exhibited as a solo artist in London (England) and Belfast (Northern Ireland), and my group shows include Format Festival (UK), Brighton Photo Fringe (UK), Lahti Fringe Festival (Finland), Gothenburg Fringe Festival (Sweden) Urban Banks Berlin (Germany) and Enjoy Museum of Art Beijing (China). My work has been published internationally including Dazed and Confused, British Journal of Photography, the BCC, The Times. Guardian, The Calvert Journal (amongst others) I work as a photographer in Europe, and a photography lecturer in Kingston University London, and I am also a co-founder of the Red Zenith Collective, an online platform for non-binary and female artists from Central and Eastern Europe.”

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