Marianne Wasowska (Paris, 1988) studied anthropology in Nanterre, before joining the ENSP Photography School of Arles, from which she graduated in 2014. She then joined Studio Hans Lucas and started working for the press as a freelance photographer and photo editor. In 2016-2017 she became an artist member of the Académie de France in Madrid (Casa de Velázquez) and the following year she received a production grant from the BilbaoArte Foundation to complete her project on dreams. In 2021 she received a CNAP grant to support documentary photography and the Howard Buffet Fund for Women Journalists from the IWMF, to develop two projects in Mexico. Her work has been exhibited at FotoFestiwal de Łódź, Boutographies, Circulation(s), Encontros do Imagem de Braga, among others. She had solo and duo exhibitions at the Muzeum Emigracji in Gdynia, PhotoEspaña and the Institut Français in Madrid. She currently lives between Marseille and Mexico City.
Her photographic work is developed through anthropologically inspired documentary research, generally long-term, which places the relationship at the center of the work, considering it both as a problematic and as a theme. By putting in dialogue heterogeneous documents (archival images, documents, drawings, sound recordings, etc.), she tries to build polyphonic narratives that question the notion of authorship and anchor their structure in the plurality of interwoven voices. She also works on mental images and the limits of perception, studying the implication of the body in the formation of images: in the retina, in the brain, within the exhibition space. She uses light to design photographic installations in which the appearance and disappearance of the image mobilizes the perceptual and cognitive mechanisms of visitors. Her practice incorporates poor, stolen images, shrunken to the point of abstraction: screenshots, digital distortions, glitches, etc., mixing them with analog processes that carry the indelible prejudice of a physical presence in front of the photographed, thus creating hybrid materialities. She relates to the different photographic medias as traces of our presence in the world.