Emilia Martin is a Polish artist and photographer based in The Hague (NL) whose artistic practice is rooted in the power of storytelling passed down through her ancestral heritage.
Growing up as part of the first generation in democratic Poland formulated her interest in how histories are constructed, preserved, and - forgotten. Working across photography, writing, sound, and sculpture, her work weaves narratives that challenge binary definitions of what is considered truth and what - fiction.
Martin grew up in between two contrasting realities: her grandmother's remote farm in rural eastern Poland and Silesia - a coal-mining industralised region in the country's west. The tensions between these environments and their radically different ways of approaching notions of history, labour, land, and belonging formed a ground from which the artist positions her research and making. In her practice she approaches oral histories, myths, rituals, and objects as archives and systems of knowledge shaping social structures and relationships between humans and the more-than-human worlds.
Central to her work is an engagement with absence. The stories and cultural practices that shape her ancestral heritage were repeatedly dismissed, fragmented, or lost, now echoing as archival gaps that cannot be filled.
Drawing on Saidiya Hartman's notion of critical fabulation* Martin approaches these absences as spaces from which speculation emerges, questioning:
Which and whose stories have been historically deemed worthy of preservation, and which have been neglected? What systems of power enabled such distinctions?
Rather than reconstructing a singular past, her work (re)imagines alternative ways of relating to historical gaps while acknowledging what remains irretrievable.
Guided by intersectional feminist discourse, she positions her practice and network as part of a bigger, living ecosystem.
_
An alumna of Photography & Society Master’s program at the Royal Academy of the Art (The Hague) in 2022, Martin works from her studio at the Stichting Daisy Chain in the Hague as well as internationally. Alongside her artistic practice, she works as an art educator, mentor and occasional lecturer, sharing her interest in storytelling, archives, and artistic research. She is one of the founders of Radio Echo - a feminist radio collective focused on reverberating diversity of voices. Her work “I saw a tree bearing stones in the place of apples and pears” was published as a book in 2024 by Yogurt Editions.
* “Venus in Two Acts”, Saidiya Hartmann, 2008
✹
The work is supported by Cultuurfonds, Mondriaan Fonds, Amarte Fonds, STROOM, Gemeente Den Haag and Instytut Adama Mickiewicza.
