About

Biography

Ioana Vrabie is an artist born in Transylvania, raised in Tuscany and currently based in Barcelona.

She has lived in four countries, moved more than thirty times and spent eight years working as a flight attendant. This restless life—continually moving between places, languages and cultures—gradually became the ground from which her artistic practice emerged.

After studying Communication Sciences in Udine, Ioana moved to London, where she studied photography at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London, and at Photofusion.

Just before setting off on a journey through Italy, India and Bali, an unexpected encounter proved pivotal: a stranger gave her a bag filled with expired film. She carried the film with her and began instinctively shooting multiple exposures, allowing accident, imperfection and intuition to enter her images. The resulting photographs marked the beginning of the visual language she continues to develop today.

Made across years of travel and displacement, her analogue multiple-exposure photographs form a personal visual archive of landscapes, memories and daydreams, in which different worlds coexist.

She returns to this archive, bringing existing images into new relationships and forms. Through embroidery, textiles, lenticular processes, objects and installation, the layered logic of the photographs moves beyond the frame and into material and space.

Ioana’s work has been exhibited internationally, with solo exhibitions in Bangkok and Barcelona and group exhibitions in New York, Budapest, Rome and Milan. Her work is held in private collections across Europe and Asia.

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Artist statement

I have spent much of my life moving. I have lived in different countries, crossed borders repeatedly and moved more than thirty times. Living between languages, cultures and landscapes has often left me with the strange feeling of belonging everywhere and nowhere at once. For years, I imagined that home might be the next place—the one I had not yet reached.

Home has never been a single place for me. It exists in fragments: in landscapes, languages, memories and different versions of myself. My work emerges from an attempt to make a home from these fragments—to bring them together without asking them to become one.

Photography first revealed what I carried inside: a restless impulse to flee, intertwined with an equally powerful longing to belong. In my analogue multiple exposures, distant places overlapped as they did in memory, while worlds separated by geography found themselves inhabiting the same frame.

The dreamlike quality of these images felt familiar. As a child, daydreaming had been a private form of shelter—a place where reality softened and I could briefly inhabit another world. When the film was developed, I recognised something of those inner landscapes. Photography had given visible form to worlds I had inhabited long before I understood what they were telling me.

I think of this process as visual grafting: fragments from separate realities are brought into relationship without losing their identities, allowing a new sense of harmony to emerge.

When I photograph, I begin by walking. I open my senses to a place and allow instinct to guide what enters the frame. Different scenes are layered directly onto the same film negative, but I cannot see exactly what has formed until the film is developed. Some elements disappear, while others emerge unexpectedly. The image is created somewhere between intention and surrender, control and trust.

Over time, these photographs have formed a personal visual archive to which I continually return. Through embroidery, translucent textiles, lenticular processes, objects and installation, I bring existing images into new relationships and allow their layered logic to move beyond the frame—into touch, movement, material and space.

At the heart of my work is a quiet longing: the search for home—not as a fixed place, but as a feeling that emerges when the different worlds I carry within me begin to belong together.

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