Tarrah Krajnak: El Jardín de Senderos Que Se Bifurcan

Filter Photo is pleased to present El Jardín de Senderos Que Se Bifurcan, an exhibition by Tarrah Krajnak. 

​Named after a Jorge Luis Borges story by the same title, the exhibition El Jardín de Senderos Que Se Bifurcan explores the process of tracing my origins amidst contradictory familial narratives.

Indigenous to Peru and orphaned as an infant I was adopted into a working-class transracial family from the American coal country and raised as a twin to my African American brother. This early experience of racial difference established my ongoing preoccupation with orphanhood, ancestral exile, origins, and the way these constructs are written on the body and in the archive. In this series, I set out not to recover some stable authentic identity hidden by the circumstances of my birth and adoption, but rather to build a psychic history, to imagine lineages, to invent mothers, and to resurrect ancestors in an effort to understand my place within the larger political, social, and historical narratives of my birthplace– Lima, Peru circa 1979.