Marta Djourina is the recipient of the 2021 BAZA Award for Contemporary Art.

“In my work I use analogue color and black and white photo paper to explore the nature of light. I study the cause and effect of various light phenomena. Light becomes a topic of investigation, a tool and an object of investigation. A performative movement, an object or a combination of both is traced with different light sources and recorded on the flat support. Performative movements take place in the darkroom, the temporality of which is translated into a painterly gesture and dynamic color composition using the analogue photographic process.”

Djourina creates individual series with works that range from intimate small formats to large scale monumental rolls of paper up to 6 meters high. Some projects concentrate on the physicality of traces of light, while others deal with the visualisation and fixation of something ephemeral. For some projects, she employs pinhole cameras, which are sent via a pigeon or by post (“Doo”, 2014). In “Glowing Attraction” and “Foxfire”, she used the light of living organisms, and most recently with “Touchpoint” historical techniques from the medical field to depict the physical proximity and the touch of a finger on the photographic paper.

Djourina’s new focus moves from movement in the picture to touch in the picture.

She is currently part of the group exhibition Direct Contact: Cameraless Photography Now curated by Lauren Richman at the Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University.

Her works have been shown in numerous exhibitions, including Berlinische Galerie – Museum of Moder Art, Sofia Arsenal – Museum of contemporary Art, FeldbuschWiesnerRudolph (Berlin) , 3:e Väningen (Gothenburg), Mark Müller (Zurich), CAN (Neuchâtel), the Eberhard-Roters grant (Preussische Seehandlung Foundation, awarded at the Berlinische Galerie, 2020), the Artist in residence at the Federal Foreign Office (2022) and the Goldrausch Künstlerinneprojekt (2022).