Marikel Lahana

The space, where it has been damaged and inscribed by time and carries its traces, serves as the decor for a portrait. One that alternates colour with black and white, which resembles a questioning rather than a shaping – an allocation – of the identity of an evolving character, both complicit and ferociously independent in front of the lens. The model’s strong personality is answered by the gentle humility of the person looking at her, who shapes and is personally involved in this portrait, which above all she does not want to give as the goal.

Armed with a rich and demanding career, both academic and professional – a diploma in CGI and special effects at the Arts Décoratifs de Paris (ENSAD), a master’s in photography at ENSP in Arles, a photography programme at Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture in Finland, as well as a diploma from Studio National des Arts Contemporains – Le Fresnoy, Marikel Lahana constantly questions photography and its representations. An approach clearly seen in the choices made for her aesthetic of grainy images in motion, exposed or printed twice, blurred or all in transparencies. Her images are fragile, moving (in all senses of the word) and also able to assert their character.

She presents herself as a “French photographer”, and adds: “Freed from a photogra-phy of the present instant, my images are a restaging of our perceptions, unveiling people’s existential difficulties. The body on its own captures and structures the visible, presenting what Marguerite Duras called, the ’indelible perfection of the personal accident’.”