RePose ExPose CounterPose presents the work of Tarrah Krajnak through a selection of major photographic series. Born in Lima and living in the United States since infancy, Krajnak has set the question of her origins, and with this her dual culture and the recent history of the land of her birth—inseparable from her own—at the heart of her work. The self-reflexiveness of her approach is accompanied and echoed by a critical re-reading of the history of photography and of the canonical models undergirding it.

Krajnak’s work explores her coming-to-be as person and as artist, her place in the world and in the history of art. This never-ending investigation relies on a variety of artistic strategies: the resonant juxtaposition of image and poetry, appropriation of the canons of photography, the reactivation of personal and collective memory, recourse to palimpsest, re-enactment… In El Jardín de senderos que se bifurcan(2018–2021), the series with which the exhibition opens, Krajnak evokes her adoption and her impossible quest for her mother. In succeeding works, she continues to draw on existing materials (vernacular images found, for example, in the popular press) while also making use of media both ancient (cyanotype) and modern (video, performance) and raising questions about the prevailing visual culture (through readings of such “masters” as Edward Weston or Ansel Adams). In the course of this personal quest, Krajnak’s bodily engagement with urban space, notably that of Lima, creates a bridge between past and present, between historic and contemporary struggles. The artist thus incorporates into her work a broad range of practices and references, reinvented and transformed in being brought into relation with our present time, in and through her body.