Marta Djourina

Recently, we learned that the Nobel Prize in Physics was this year attributed for the “groundbreaking inventions” in the field of laser physics. Could it be that the laser, this small presentation pointer that anyone can carry on a keychain, would receive such an honorable distinction? This common object is indeed very significant and covers a particularly large field of application. From targeting to healing, it extends its benefits from atmospheric remote sensing for measuring the distance to the moon, to the supermarket barcodes readers or as a precise eye surgery instruments. Through its light – “spatially coherent, directional, monochromatic, high-powered” – and its multiple uses, it evokes and enlightens the territories of action and navigation of human beings.  

Lasers, bioluminescent organisms, her own displacement and other natural sources are some of Marta Djourina’s medium.  In her practice, she explores analog photography, playing within its margins, experimenting with its processes, limits and failures – but also its activation in time and space. Here, her camera takes the measure of the room and the laser pointer becomes her extension. Through gestures, technical movements belonging alternately to writing, spray-painting or photography, her own body and the tools become the intermediate, the vehicle to tame and conduct the light onto the surface. The space becomes a subject of investigation and the apparatus at the same time; a device of which she is a technical component and the reference scale. 

In the exhibition A Finger On The Pulse,  Marta Djourina inscribes with fine lines and marks her trajectory – taking on her way dust, residues or other unexpected shapes – onto large format photopapers. Acting as projection surface, they take then the form of modular walls, following the lines and proportions of the room, the one of the exhibitions that takes place in the former Hospital Regina Maria Adelaide in Torino, Italy. Through medical processes and hospital complex, bodies circulate and transform. They meet others, patients, doctors, healthy bodies and functional places or surgery tools. For a determined time, they transit through the confined rooms of the institution while they are taken care of. What are their path and which are the left images of these intimacies and vulnerabilities? The hospital as the exhibition context, recalls a certain collective memory, the scientific imagery as a continuous attempt to see through the body, a wish for lighting and transparency. Marta Djourina’s corpus enters then in resonance with this common visual material. She acts with and scans through the rays her own situatedness as if she was to record and define the contours of this fragile relationship to the direct environment.

Text by Marie DuPasquier

Marta Djourina was born in Sofia in 1991. After graduating from art history and theory she received in 2018 her Meisterschüler Degree 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. Marta Djourina’s work has been exhibited in Bulgaria, Greece, Germany, Scotland, Austria and Norway. Recently Marta Djourina received the recognition prize of the IBB Prize for Photography (in cooperation with the Karl-Hofer Society). www.martadjourina.com

Special thanks to Sara Petrucci for the impulse.
Photo by Matteo Nisticò, Marta Djourina, Max Hilsamer

Pater Noster, Marta Djourina in coll. with Jane Garbert, 2016-2018