Eva Stenram is an artist using appropriation and collage living and working in Berlin. Her practice considers materiality and how photography can be enlisted as a memory of cultural byproducts such pin-ups and travel magazines.
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Episode 24: Eva Stenram‘s practice constitutes a use of appropriated materials that span the gamut from pin-up photographs to travel magazines.
Her work has a sculptural form that is not only predicated by the cutting of two dimensional imagery, but instead she has also focused on making work in which the core elements within a photograph are employed to make sculptural objects which subsequently cross the divide from a two-dimensional frame to physical space as seen in her work Vanishing Points.
I had the great experience to work with Eva in 2013 when I asked nine female artists to respond to my collection of historic vernacular photographs in an exhibition called “Unnatural Selection: 9 Female Artists Respond to the Collection of Brad Feuerhelm“. This exhibition was shown during Unseen Festival in Amsterdam that year. Eva employed her genius to polaroids in my holdings offering a completely new and re-imagined use of my collection.
I was able to speak with Eva about her practice in this episode, her move to Berlin and a number of other important factors in her evaluation of the photographic image. It was exciting to speak about her new work in which she considers how images of Europe from the past can be applied to current reading of the political lay of the land. New Meridians calls into question a number of pertinent topics such as immigration, Brexit and the idea of how we “read” diagrams in relation to images and how the technological complexities of Google Earth “blackout” cartography censors provide interesting parallels in the New Meridians work.
Eva’s work is engaging and exceeds the trappings of traditional discourses in photography by asking larger questions about the use of historic material and about what it means to subvert and challenge the viewer through the use of spectacle and authorship. I hope to have more conversations with Eva going forward as her work intrigues me and I find her use of material effort very convincing.
