Marta Djourina

This exhibition is made of steps. The ones that help her to move a stone from a place to another. The steps she must follow carefully during the process. The steps of printing.

In her practice, Marta Djourina investigates analog photography, playing within its margins, experimenting with its processes, limits and failures. She builds her own cameras or replaces the typical film negative with 3-dimensional everyday objects instead. Those so called ‘filtergrams’ allow her to operate a zoom into materiality (of the camera itself or the object) enabling the light shape the objects, a unique piece as the result of a hybrid process between sculpture and drawing, avoiding all the while questioning the reproduction of images.

Here, she uses lithography, another well-known reproduction method that she diverts gently. She touches and marks the stones directly. She let her body and prints, with grease and color, onto this natural carrier and as an organic response, walking around and carrying the stone, she would start to feel the impact of this contact. Two matters entering in communication in an organized movement and rendered in the hazardous traces of a process. Inprint.

Clean the stone, grab the stone, leave traces, move, print. The path is felt physically. She repeats the movements, the same steps, every day during the whole technical process until they become like an intimate liturgy. For the exhibition, she constructed a map that retraces her trajectory.

The stone weights 32.9 kg. 

Marta Djourina was born in Sofia in 1991. After graduating from art history and theory she started studying fine arts at the University of the Arts Berlin (UdK). Her work involves analogue direct exposure processes and light paintings or drawings. What can be described as cameraless photography is based on the principal aspects defining analogue photography, combining them with concepts such as time, space and chance. In a similar matter like in the darkroom, the ideas of ‘blind’ drawings are to be found also in her printmaking projects, in which she explores her own traces. Djourina’s work has been exhibited in Bulgaria, Greece, Germany, Scotland, Austria and Norway. Recently Djourina received the recognition prize of the IBB Prize for Photography (in cooperation with the Karl-Hofer Society).

Photo by Marta Djourina