Marzena Abrahamik: GirlPlay

Marzena Abrahamik’s imagined tableaus explore political and fantastical themes emerging at the intersection of women’s rights and cannabis culture. Cannabis legality and women’s freedoms remain sites of ongoing political struggle, their regulations shifting with the social climate. The mythology of the “stoner” has been coded male—humorous, passive, and carefree—while women’s desires have often been framed as excessive. GirlPlay counters these narratives, staging lush, dreamlike environments where cannabis becomes a site of feminine agency, sidestepping the male gaze and grounding new attachments to creativity and freedom. 

Intimate and surreal, the photographs in GirlPlay portray nakedness not as a vulnerability but as a marker of agency and care. Portraits acknowledge the body as a site of both pleasure and struggle; landscapes blur the cultural touchstones of a daydreamy paradise; and still-lifes become a hyper-focused endeavor involving low stakes and joy. Abrahamik’s images insist on a female discourse, presenting women in relation to one another rather than as objects of a male fantasy. GirlPlay invites viewers to consider photography not as a passive reflection of reality but as an active site of women’s pleasure, rebellion, and transformation.