Krajnak’s experiences as an Indigenous transracial adoptee inform much of her practice, which incorporates lens-based imagery with performance and poetry. Adopted by a Slovak-American family from Lima, Peru in 1979, and brought up in Ohio, Krajnak’s work employs strategies of fragmentation, refraction, assemblage and invention to imagine the circumstances of her birth and the lives of those she left behind. The images in SISMOS79 are photographs of temporary still-life sculptures that Krajnak constructs out of broken glass and mirrors layered with archive imagery from pornographic and political magazines dated from the year she was born. “The resulting photographs are not archival so much as counter-archival,” writes Krajnak, “a fractured atlas of collage, high-keyed abstraction, found light and broken glass.” Krajnak doesn’t attempt to recover some kind of “authentic” identity obscured by the circumstances of her birth and adoption, but instead weaves and montages together fragments and cultural symbols to invent something like a psychic history of that year, and locate herself within it.

The title “Sismos”, which translates as “earthquake”, reflects the seismic shifts underway in Peru’s capital at the end of the 1970s, a transitional period between military dictatorship and the onset of guerilla war. Krajnak’s birth mother was likely to have been one of many thousands of Indigenous rural migrants from Peru’s highlands and jungles who arrived in Lima during this period. It was a time characterised by sexual violence and terror; according to the Catholic nuns in whose care Krajnak was left as a newborn, her mother’s pregnancy was the result of rape. An undercurrent of transgenerational trauma runs throughout Krajnak’s assemblages, which position the act of photography as, in some ways, recuperative. Krajnak reflects: “I am interested in the multi-temporality of the photographic medium, and the potential of the darkroom itself as a site of performance or spectro-poetics—a way of conjuring the ghosts that haunt a life.”