Fluid Light

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Sarieva/Gallery is pleased to present the solo exhibition of Berlin-based Bulgarian artist Marta Djourina. “Fluid Light” will be on view from October 1 to November 16, 2025 at the gallery space in Sofia, located at DOT Sofia, featuring a new series of works, some of which continue the exploration of themes and techniques developed by the artist over the past two years. The exhibition is presented in partnership with AYA Estate Vineyards – a new destination near Melnik, whose publicly accessible collection of contemporary art includes significant works by Marta Djourina.

The exhibition text is written by Berlin-based curator and critic Boris Kostadinov.

Marta Djourina’s series “Fluid Light” explores inspiration, emotion, and delight of contemplation, carried by the harmonies of intensified color. In her practice, thesecomplex and captivating chromatic compositions are not rigid aesthetic imperatives but unfold as a dynamic artistic—and at times scientific—process, informed and inspired by quantum theory, photonics, and optics. Pulsating, explosive colorations move between abundance and reduction, between orchestrated intensity and sudden monochrome pauses.

Light—the central element—emerges as an autonomous substance: capricious, mutable, capable both of building and of destroying images. In this sense, the series constructs scenographies of perception, built through visual excess and an unquenchable thirst for inspiring imagery, color, and materiality.

The great paradox lies in the fact that this visual feast is born within the womb of profound darkness—the photographic darkroom, where light is an unwelcome intruder and color a foreign stranger. It is a place where the eye’s impatience to once again glimpse the brilliance of day is subdued by a stoic immersion into the world of night. And it is precisely there that a crucial, secret agent plays a devoted role in the making of the works.

Who is this mysterious agent, without whom the alchemy would be impossible? Naturally—the ray of light.
For years, Marta Djourina has studied and employed it as an indispensable instrument, a form-building collaborator in her works.

Throughout the process, the photographic paper remains untouched by the human hand. Instead, light itself becomes the mighty creator of imagery. Photons strike the paper’s surface, refract, scatter, and collide anew. In their quantum dance, these fragments of laser explosions caress and finally inscribe the emulsion through a fleeting, instantaneous passage and disappearance.

Thus, each work becomes a document, a monument to this extraordinary encounter between billions of unstable light particles and the enduring density of substance. What we see are not images of something, but rather portraits of light itself, whose immateriality crystallizes into material form.

Djourina’s process deliberately establishes this radical dependence on light as both subject and medium. The works are not merely abstract images; they are events—records of energy, of collision, of flow.

The exhibition title, Fluid Light, encapsulates the essence of this practice. Fluid is both a state of matter and a metaphor—shifting, unstable, impossible to confine in one place. Under the artist’s orchestration, light behaves like liquid: it spills across surfaces, seeps into folds, gathers in chromatic gradients. Yet fluidity is also corporeal. These images pulse like blood vessels; their chromatic tides echo abrupt breathing or the shimmer of a tear.

The folded paper that underlies these images introduces a subtle volumetric tension. During exposure, the folds interrupt and redirect the laser beams, creating shadows, gradients, and chromatic ruptures.

The works are simultaneously flat and three-dimensional, surface and relief, image and object. It is precisely this refusal of pure flatness—together with the choreographies enacted in the photographic darkroom—that situates Djourina’s practice at an exceptional intersection: where photographic experiment, sculptural insistence, and the elemental force of performance converge.

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Marta Djourina, b. 1991 in Sofia, completed her studies in art history at Humboldt University of Berlin (B.A.) and the Technical University in Berlin (M.A.) and in fine arts as a master student at the UdK Berlin. Since 2024 she is Artist in Research at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp and has been a guest lecturer at University of the Arts Berlin since 2020. Her works have been shown in numerous international exhibitions, most recently at MNAHA Luxembourg, Lage Egal Brussels, Haus am Kleistpark (Berlin), Sofia Arsenal - Museum of Contemporary Art, Goethe-Institut Bulgaria, ICA-Sofia, Berlinische Galerie - Museum of Contemporary Art, FeldbuschWiesnerRudolph (Berlin) etc. Her works are in the collection of the Berlinische Galerie, the Eskenazi Museum of Contemporary art, Indiana University in the USA, IBB Berlin, EiB Luxembourg among others. She has received the EMOP Arendt Prize for Photography (2025), the Presentation Grant for publications of the State of Berlin (2023), the AArtist in Residence of the Federal Foreign Office (2022), the Marianne Brand Prize for Photography (2022), BAZA Award (2021), the Eberhard Roters Scholarship (Preussische Seehandlung Foundation, awarded at the Berlinische Galerie, 2020), and others. 
In 2023, she spent 2 months at RU Residency Unlimited in New York (as a part of BAZA 2021) and 3 months at Cité internationale des arts in Paris (ADP Artist Development Program of the EiB Institute in Luxemburg). In 2024 she was continued her work on extending the project "Fluid Contact" at a residency at Museum Landskorna Foto in Sweden and in 2025 in Rostock in collaboration with the University of Rostock on the occasion of the international year of quantum physics. In 2024 Djourina published her first extensive monograph with DISTANZ Berlin, with texts by Gregory Volk, Babette Werner, Miriam Jesske and Dr. Sarah Frost, which has been translated into Bulgarian, German and English. 

Sarieva/Gallery @ DOT Sofia / Ul. Bratya Miladinovi 46, Women’s Market, 1303 Sofia, Bulgaria

Visiting hours during shows:  Wednesday – Saturday: 1:30 p.m. – 7:00 p.m. / Sunday: 1 p.m. – 4 p.m.

Media Coverage of the show