Bruke Marew
Bruke Marew is an Ethiopian/Kenyan designer and visual storyteller based in New York City.
Working across photography, spatial design, and installation, his practice is driven by a long-standing fascination with light as both material and subject. He explores how light reveals, obscures, and alters our perception of space, memory, and time. Through a process-driven approach that merges digital and analog techniques, Bruke examines the fragile relationship between permanence and change, and how spaces, objects, and images hold traces of lived experience. His work often sits at the intersection of architecture and visual art, using light as a tool to question how memory is constructed, distorted, and preserved.
Light Burn is an ongoing photographic exploration of the fleeting nature of time and memory, using light and shadow to express both presence and impermanence. Drawing from traditional darkroom techniques such as dodge and burn, reimagined digitally, the series captures moments where clarity becomes unstable, and memory begins to dissolve.
Each image exists in tension, marked by overexposure, distortion, and abstraction. The process itself mirrors loss and recollection, using gestures of light to hold onto what cannot be fully retained. By transforming traces of familiar environments into dreamlike impressions, Light Burn explores the impossibility of preserving what is always slipping away, and the fragile attempt to hold time still within a frame of light.
Exhibitions
Impossibilities