BIO
Marlena Walach Szejka is a visual artist working with photography and video. Her practice focuses on presence, disappearance, and the fragile spaces between what is visible and what remains hidden. She creates images that move between intimacy, silence, tension, and observation. Through personal and emotionally charged work, she explores perception, memory, vulnerability, and the difficulty of fully seeing another person. Her projects often emerge from close relationships and everyday moments, where small gestures, absence, and atmosphere become central to the image.
Artist statment
My work begins with moments that are often quiet, ordinary, and easy to miss. I work with photography and video to explore presence, disappearance, and the unstable space between them. I am interested in what can be seen clearly and what resists visibility, in images that hold tension, silence, and emotional uncertainty. Rather than trying to explain everything directly, I want the work to remain open, leaving space for ambiguity, feeling, and personal interpretation.Many of my projects come from close observation and personal experience. I return to subjects such as absence, vulnerability, fear, intimacy, and the emotional weight carried by bodies, spaces, and gestures. I am drawn to moments where something appears only partially, where a figure is obscured, where an image feels suspended between recognition and loss. In this way, my practice is not only about showing, but also about withholding, about the limits of perception and about the desire to be seen, understood, or remembered.I want my work to create a space in which looking becomes slower and more attentive. Through stillness, fragmentation, and atmosphere, I try to build images that do not close meaning down, but invite the viewer into a more uncertain and emotional encounter.
