DBPFP25: Tarrah Krajnak

Tarrah Krajnak (b.1979, Peru) is shortlisted for the exhibition Shadowings. A Catalogue of Attitudes for Estranged Daughters at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam (28 October 2023 – 3 March 2024).

Coloured cyanotype images featuring what appears to be hands and feet.

DBPFP25: Tarrah Krajnak

Tarrah Krajnak (b.1979, Peru) is shortlisted for the exhibition Shadowings. A Catalogue of Attitudes for Estranged Daughters at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam (28 October 2023 – 3 March 2024).

The Peruvian-American artist bends time and blurs the lines between staged self-portraiture and performance, self and other, fact and fiction. The nominated exhibition brings together her most important work spanning twenty years. Krajnak consistently uses the camera as a research tool and takes a conceptual approach to the rematerialisation of photography.  

Krajnak is deeply invested in the craft and processes of photography. She continues to print all of her own photographs, using methods including pigment prints from colour film, silver gelatin prints, cyanotypes and anthotypes (images made using plant-based light-sensitive materials).   

Krajnak’s own body appears often, and her production sites move between the studio, fieldwork and darkroom. Krajnak turns her lens to other photography, including work by the ‘masters’ of photography. She antagonises the received art historical canon by restaging these key works with her own bodily interventions.   

 

Black and white photograph of a woman curled up around a rock on the ground.

Sister Rock/Rock that Tries to Forget (from Automatic Rocks/Excavation), 2020. © Tarrah Krajnak