Bourse du Talent 2026 : Nyima Marin

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My grandparents met in Alexandria, a city where, for millennia, the hot desert wind known as the Khamsin has blown. One spring day, shortly after my grandmother passed away, the Parisian sky filled with dust carried from the Sahara and turned red, almost golden, as if in a dream. My grandfather was taking a nap at that moment and, watching him, I imagined him among the dunes, carried by that warm wind inviting him toward a place he could not yet reach—close to the city of his first love, surrounded by the sands and dust that lie in wait, eager to erase memory and dissolve time.

The following year, just days before his hundredth birthday, he finally yielded to that call from the desert. I then travelled to the Egyptian Sahara, where I imagined this catabatic journey into the afterlife and toward the beloved, inspired as much by the Duat of the Egyptian Book of the Dead as by the descents into the underworld undertaken by Orpheus and Dante.

I wanted to work with monochromatic golden images, varnishing silver gelatin prints on glass, with the intention of preserving sand as a fundamental component of the image while evoking the mythological imagery of Egyptian gilding and Orphic gold tablets. I also sought to explore the tension between negative and positive, considering these photographs as deserts in themselves—interfaces between two worlds: dream and reality, day and night, life and death.

Born in Crete in 1987, Nyima Marin graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure Louis-Lumière in 2012, following higher studies in physics. Since then, he has pursued an exploration of the ambiguities and narrative possibilities inherent to the photographic medium, while granting an important place to literature within his practice.

Over time, his work has evolved toward the possibility of a metaphysics through images. Questions surrounding nature in relation to narrative, the individual, and history have become central to his research. In 2018, he began a body of work inspired by his birth in Crete. This blue monochromatic quest for an original and archaic world forms the first chapter of an ongoing investigation that intertwines poetry, alternative printing processes, Mediterranean mythology, and family history.

At the end of 2022, he published The Minotaur’s Farewell (L’Adieu du Minotaure), his first monograph, with the support of the agnès b. endowment fund. His work has been exhibited at numerous venues and festivals, including Planches Contact, InCadaqués, and the Rencontres Photographiques du 10e.