Paulina Korobkiewicz was born in Suwałki, Poland in 1993. After studying at the Warsaw School of Photography and Graphic design (2010–12), she moved to London in 2012 to study Fine Art Photography at Camberwell College of Arts UAL (University of the Arts, London, 2012–15). Based in London since 2012, Korobkiewicz is particularly known for her photographs of post-communist architecture and spaces in Eastern Europe, which she has published and exhibited across the UK since 2016.
Photographer Paulina Korobkiewicz was born in Suwałki, Poland in 1993. Growing up in eastern Poland near the border of Lithuania, Korobkiewicz became interested in Eastern Europe’s transition from socialism to capitalism and how this can be explored through picturing its contemporary urban landscape. She studied at the Warsaw School of Photography and Graphic design between 2010 and 2012, and in that time she gave talks and participated in exhibitions in Poland. In order to expand her practice, Korobkiewicz moved to London, England in 2012 to study Fine Art Photography at Camberwell College of Arts, University of the arts London, completing her BA degree in 2015.
During her degree at Camberwell, Korobkiewicz exhibited in several group exhibitions in London. She participated in the Unit show at Café Gallery Projects & Dilston Grove (2013), New State at Peckham Liberal Club (2014) and Fingerprint at Unit 27 The Artworks (2014). Her work at this time continued to expand her particular interest in the urban landscape of her hometown in Poland and the surrounding region, photographing buildings in a way that emphasised geometric lines, shadows, light and their sculptural qualities. Korobkiewicz self-published these photographs in a book, Disco Polo in 2016, as a means of documenting the aesthetic ambiguities and contradictions of Poland’s post-communist urban landscape. The same year she exhibited her project in her first solo show in the UK at Bermondsey Project Space in London. The project was shortlisted for the BarTur Photobook Award, organised by The Photographers’ Gallery and Belfast Photo Festival Open Submission 2017.
At the same time that her Disco Polo project was underway, Korobkiewicz was awarded the Camberwell Book Prize in 2016, established by the Camberwell College of Arts’ Photography department in order to help BA Photography graduates reach an extended audience with their work. She gave a talk at the College that year, and with Camberwell Press she published her second photobook, Perspectives, in 2017. Continuing her interests first explored in Disco Polo, Korobkiewicz’s second photobook takes the viewer on a tour of city streets in an interactive exploration where individual photographs gain additional meanings through collections and accumulations ‘intended to extend the viewer’s experience of viewing the photographs featured inside it’ (Korobkiewicz, 2017). She was subsequently nominated for the Magnum Photos Graduate Photographers Award 2017 and Prix Pictet 2018.
While on a photographic trip in Lithuania in 2018, Korobkiewicz came across an abandoned factory in Alytus. Discovering a wealth of neglected artefacts, textile samples, and personal photographs of factory staff, the trip augmented Udarny trud; a project so-called after a Russian term for productive, enthusiastic labour. Focussing on photographing the interior, Udarny trud explored the factory as a systemic site of social experience, class and politics, and how its remnants can be archived. The completed project was exhibited at Centrala Space, Birmingham in 2020.
Growing in accolades and recognition, in 2022 Korobkiewicz was commissioned to participate in the Migrant Essential Workers project, organised by a partnership between Glasgow, Middlesex and Sheffield Universities with the support from the Polish Social and Cultural Association (among others). The same year she began a year-long residency with Centrala Space entitled Post-Socialist Britain?: Memory, Representation and Political Identity Amongst German and Polish Immigrants in the UK, organised in partnership with the University of Birmingham and the University of Nottingham. Korobkiewicz continues to live and work in London. Her work is not currently held in any UK public collections.