By Jon Feinstein, September 10, 2025
Tarrah Krajnak’s “Body Configurations” is an ongoing series of self-portraits that started in Venice in 2024, contorting and photographing herself around buildings and landmarks to examine what she describes as the “tension between the physicality of my own body and the political, historical, and psychological forces embedded into the architecture of a city.”
Referencing VALIE EXPORT's pioneering feminist and confrontational photo-performances from the 1970s, she looks inward to explore the mystery of her own relationship to place. Krajnak also builds on the photo-performance traditions of artists like Carrie Mae Weems, whose “Roaming” series placed her body in and around Rome’s historical sites to address her relationship to power and colonialism.
Krajnak’s grainy, square gelatin silver prints’ murky greys thicken the air, casting buildings of another time in a ghostly haze. And her gestures – sometimes organic, sometimes warm, and sometimes intentionally awkward – reflect her relationship to this modernist and sometimes Brutalist landscape, from sweeping, aerial views to sculptures, interiors, and raw building materials.
A five-image portfolio from the series, made in Lima, Peru, where Krajnak was born, is on view until September 28 as part of The Frye Museum’s Boren Banner Series, a hallway of photos inside the museum, accompanied by a massive vinyl banner, “Body Configurations (Lima) 01”, 2024, hanging outside. In this publicly displayed banner – which is central to the Frye’s mission to create engagement beyond the museum’s walls – the artist stands in front of the José Castro Mendivil Digital Planetarium, which was founded in 1946 amidst remnants of the Battle of San Juan from the War of the Pacific. Krajnak faces the camera, bent forward, hands locked around her ankles, hair nearly touching the ground in front of her, body mimicking and challenging the building’s planetary shape. Her intervention feels both playful and powerful, taking space before a roadside-attraction-like strangeness while figuring out where, exactly, she fits in.
Born in 1977, Krajnak was separated from her birth mother and adopted from an orphanage when she was three months old by a Slovak-American family. They raised her in a predominantly white working-class Ohio suburb as an American with almost no ties to Lima’s culture or her biological ancestors. These photos–and much of her photographic practice–are about what she calls “impossibility of return.” Since many international adoptions were corrupt and lack a paper trail, she doesn’t know exactly where or when she was born. While we might jump to call this series a “diaspora study,” it’s less about cultural dispersal and more about looking at racial and biological indigeneity. She’s a tourist amidst the blurriness of her roots.
In “Body Configurations (Lima) 03”, 2024, the least urban of them all, Krajnack wraps her arms around a freestanding metal grid in the middle of a beach or desert. The structure recalls sci-fi monoliths from Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey”. Again, her face is obscured to emphasize her gesture–the hug of a mysterious architectural relic. Was it left by aliens? Colonizers of another era? Or maybe it’s just a strange exercise tool buried in the sand? As outside viewers, we have few clues, so our minds search through our own cultural reference points. And for Krajnak, this perplexity draws out the mystery of her relationship to the land.
In another image, “Body Configurations (Lima) 02”, 2024, Krajnack looks out onto a city landscape dressed in black, nearly silhouetted, calmly contemplating. We can’t see her face, yet there’s an energy and personality to her body language that makes her not quite anonymous amidst the grainy city heat. She’s looking at pueblos jóvenes (“young towns”), settlements established by millions of rural immigrants surrounding Lima’s center. Like all of her photos, her body breaks the landscape, reframing how the human body and her identity interrupt or fit in.
Krajnack’s interventions are not just about challenging or culture and jamming the landscape. They’re open, ambiguous, and revelatory. While on one level, they interrupt cities shaped by inequity, her puncturing of history is also about balancing and embedding her presence and unresolved history within it.
Jon Feinstein is a photographer, curator, writer, the co-founder of the Humble Arts Foundation, and lead curator at VSCO.
TARRAH KRAJNAK “Body Configurations (Lima) 04”, 2024. © Tarrah Krajnak. Courtesy Zander Galerie, Cologne.
Installation view of Boren Banner Series: Tarrah Krajnak, Frye Art Museum, Seattle, 2025.
TARRAH KRAJNAK "Body Configurations (Lima) 01", 2024. © Tarrah Krajnak. Courtesy Zander Galerie, Cologne.
TARRAH KRAJNAK "Body Configurations (Lima) 02", 2024. © Tarrah Krajnak. Courtesy Zander Galerie, Cologne.