V&A Photography Centre opening celebration: an evening with artists

Noémie Goudal and Tarrah Krajnak, both featured in the opening displays of the Photography Centre, will explore parts of their practice that expand on their exhibited works. Goudal will present a film screening and Krajnak will give a poetry recital, each followed by a Q&A with V&A curators.

Noémie Goudal is a French artist whose practice involves the construction of ambitiously staged installations, documented using film and photography. Her illusionistic interventions are developed from research into ecology, time geology and anthropology, which interrogates the complex history and limitations of the natural world. Goudal’s monumental photographic sculpture 'Untitled (Giant Phoenix)', 2022, from the series ‘Post Atlantica’, is included in the Photography Centre's opening displays. It analyses climate and geology to reveal our geography as fleeting and constantly evolving. After a screening of Goudal's film work related to 'Untitled (Giant Phoenix)', the artist will be joined for a Q&A by Marta Weiss, Senior Curator of Photography and Lead Curator of the Photography Centre.

Tarrah Krajnak is an artist working across photography, performance, and poetry. She was born in Lima, Peru during a period of significant political turmoil and was raised in the USA by her adoptive family. Through the V&A’s new Parasol Foundation Women in Photography programme, the museum recently acquired '1979 Contact Negatives', a series of nine cyanotype self-portraits in which Krajnak stages a performance using newspaper and archival footage from Lima in the violent year of her birth. By ‘reinserting’ her Indigenous body into her native birthplace, the artist makes a visceral connection between her personal trauma and the brutality experienced by a nation. Krajnak will perform a poetry recital alongside a visual presentation, followed by a Q&A with Fiona Rogers, Parasol Foundation Curator of Women in Photography.