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.
Sister Rock/Rock that Tries to Forget (from Automatic Rocks/Excavation), 2020. © Tarrah Krajnak
More about Tarrah Krajnak
Tarrah Krajnak (b. Lima, Peru 1979) works across photography, performance, and poetry. Krajnak is currently based in Los Angeles and is an Associate Professor of Art at UCLA. She is represented by Zander Galerie, Cologne/Paris. Krajnak is a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow and was recently awarded the Jury Prize of the Louis Roederer Discovery Award at Les Rencontres d’Arles, a Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize from the Center for Documentary Studies, and the Hariban Grand Prize, from Benrido, Kyoto, Japan. Krajnak has published three books including El Jardín De Senderos Que Se Bifurcan (DAIS 2021), Master Rituals II: Weston's Nudes (TBW 2022) and RePose (FW Books 2023). Her work has been widely published and exhibited, including at Centre Pompidou, Paris, Victoria & Albert Museum, London, and the Huis Marseille Museum of Photography, Amsterdam. Krajnak’s work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Tate Modern, Victoria & Albert Museum, Centre Pompidou, Paris, The Pinault Collection, Paris, Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, and The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC among others.
