Alexander Komenda (Poland/Canada)
City of Tomorrow

Tapiola: the garden city of tomorrow. A dog leading the owner’s leash down the street, stomping grounds that a runner clocks on his last lap. Left, right, forwards, backwards, every which way looking for those who wait. Scrolling definitions, panning through information on the park bench or opening a thesaurus to a word that manages to escape its designated seating with every glance. Idyllic and modest, thistles busy widening the cracks in the concrete. A belt buckled to the function like a thought towering at the top, cape in the wind. Waiting, reading a magazine in the waiting room just like the one at the dental office, waiting for your name to get called out. When do we know when we’ve arrived? Make-believe for a pinch of solace in the vernacular, accessible for all and flummox free. Echoes of a ruckus galavanting in the upper strata before they slip on caviar, bathing with sturgeons - boasting like: who caught the biggest barracuda? The golden age flashing before our eyes, the golden age ubiquitous as relative as gravity and time trying to peep into the physicist’s study cabinet. A jocular sycophant dining with the elated harbinger. Panacea in front of our noses, quaint, clear of all qualms.

Alexander Komenda (b. 1992) is a Polish-Canadian documentary photographer based in Espoo, Finland. Through long-term photographic projects, he explores questions of home, family, memory, identity and belonging, examining how everyday life reflects broader social and historical change. His work combines photography, text and multimedia, with an emphasis on sustained observation and close relationships with his subjects. He holds a BA in Documentary Photography from the University of South Wales and an MA in Photography from Aalto University. In 2022 he was awarded Third Prize in the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize at the National Portrait Gallery, London. His work has also been exhibited internationally, including at the Finnish Museum of Photography, Helsinki, and Technische Sammlungen Dresden. His forthcoming monograph, A Bowlful of Kumis (Studio Samadi, 2027), draws on more than a decade of work in Kyrgyzstan and the Altai Republic, documenting everyday life through photography and text. Across his practice, Komenda is interested in how intimate, long-term observation can illuminate wider questions of family, place and social change.