Eva Stenram
Drape

Exhibition: 20 September – 17 November

Eva Stenram was born in Stockholm, Sweden, and currently lives and works in London. Since graduating from the Royal College of Art in 2003, Stenram has exhibited internationally; she has been included in shows at the V&A Museum (UK), Seoul Museum of Art (South Korea), Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum (India) and Zendai Museum of Modern Art (China). In 2012, Stenram was nominated for the Les Rencontres d’Arles Discovery Award, in 2013 she was selected as a finalist in the Hyeres International Photography Competition.

Eva Stenram brings together analogical archival material and digital manipulation, creating scenarios where the uncanny takes centre stage. Stenram often uses found images, such as negatives, magazines and images from the Internet, as her source of inspiration and working material. The square images all derive from original medium format negatives; the rest of the (rectangular) images are derived from the 1960s men’s magazine Cavalcade and retain their original size and layout in relation to the magazine page, with blank areas standing in for excised text. These are scanned or downloaded to digital files that the artist manipulates, reinterpreting at each time the image anew. Drape uses vintage pin-up photographs as its source material. Stenram sought out images, mainly from the 1960s, in which women are posed in interior (semi-) domestic sets in front of curtains or drapes. Manipulating these, she extended the curtains to partially obscure the women, re-enforcing the former’s role as a marker between public and private. The curtain vacillates between striptease-drape and blind or shutter. The background, meanwhile, envelopes the focal point and the foreground slips into the background. The pictures in Drape make no attempt to look ‘real’. Sections of the images are blurred that would normally be in focus; the gaze of the viewer is deflected and redirected, putting an overlooked part of the image in the spotlight. However, the presence of the model still teases the viewer into scrutinizing the picture. Her work questions our understanding of notions such as time and space, giving life to hybrid realms whose exact temporal and cultural coordinates are ambivalent and difficult to locate. Besides, by questioning the paradigms and hierarchical values of different photographic genres, the artist confers to found imagery altogether a new meaning.

The “Drape” will be presented at the parallel program of the Fifth Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art.