Artist Talk with Tarrah Krajnak

In her artistic practice, Tarrah Krajnak brings together performance, photography, video, text, and archival research to reveal the histories and power structures embedded in photographic images. Working from her own Indigenous body, she employs the camera as well as strategies of reenactment, re-staging, and re-photography to develop new, critical relationships with colonial image archives and historical materials. Rooted in conceptual photography and its rematerialization, Krajnak understands photography not as a documentary tool, but as a means of making suppressed and forgotten histories visible. The medium becomes a space of collective imagination and a dialogue between past and present—one that actively questions power relations shaped by gender, race, and class.

The artist talk offers insights into Krajnak’s artistic methodology and her ongoing engagement with photography as a political, embodied, and performative practice.

Bio

Tarrah Krajnak (b.1979, Lima, Peru) is an artist and educator based in Los Angeles. She is an Associate Professor of Art at UCLA, and is represented by Galerie Thomas Zander, Cologne. Krajnak is the recipient of the 2025 Henri Cartier-Bresson Creation Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Louis Roederer Discovery Award at Les Rencontres d'Arles, and the Dorothea Lange- Paul Taylor Prize among others.
She 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). Krajnak’s work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; The Pinault Collection, Paris; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; and the Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City; among others. Recent solo exhibitions include “Shadowings” at the Huis Marseille Museum for Photography, Amsterdam; “Body Configurations” at the Frye Museum, Seattle; and “RePose ExPose CounterPose” at the Foundation A Stichting, Brussels currently on view. She is currently based in Berlin as a research fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.