EVA STENRAM 

Published 1 September 2025

Eva Stenram is one of the six artist part of the show Shaping the Unclaimed curated by Kati Ots and Trine Stephensen during the Tallinn Photomonth 2025. Shaping the Unclaimed is an international urban space exhibition that takes place in six locations around the Kaubamaja department store’s intersection. In an urban environment saturated with an overwhelming amount of stimuli, the project seeks ways in which art can offer moments of relief and open new perspectives on what we see and experience daily.

This urban landscape is a visually and historically charged area where layers of different eras as well as important landmarks of Tallinn meet. Kaubamaja department store and Viru Centre – two symbols of commercial architecture from different eras. A new skyscraper being built on the site of the former Estonian Academy of Arts. The polemic statue Dusk located on the terrace of the Viru Centre. A constant flow of people, both underground and on the ground. You are standing in a monumental environment – not just in terms of scale, but also in terms of meaning and visual intensity.

The site-specific works intervene with the urban space on multiple levels, turning up both on the usual walking paths as well as in places that tend to be often overlooked. The selection of artists is similarly diverse. All the artworks have been created specifically for the Kaubamaja intersection, and the artists from different generations and nationalities endow the exhibition with their unique perspectives and ways of relating to the space.

What reference or influence (if any) do you take from other mediums?

Mostly, I work with found photographic images. These images are scanned, rephotographed, or otherwise reimagined in my work. This already existing world of images is the main inspiration of my work but I also take inspiration from literature, film and art history. Currently I am reading a lot of psychoanalysis. I am interested in how we look at images; what is this process of looking and viewing, the observation and exchange between the object and the viewer? How do we digest pictures?

Are these pictures concerned with exploring formal and aesthetic interests – studies of form, colour, movement, how things work together, or are they representational, metaphorical?

My projects often have a conceptual rather than aesthetic rationale. Sometimes it is the process itself that becomes the main focus and driver of the concept. Once that is in place, more formal and aesthetic concerns also start to influence the work.

Typically, are your works more about construction or deconstruction?

There is a push and pull between construction and deconstruction. As I build or add something new within an image, something else is lost. As I remove something, another space is gained. I am interested in shifting our attention from one place to another, from foreground to background, from the focal point to the overlooked, deliberately distorting the conventional photographic plane.

Are you a photographer or an artist using photography?

I am an artist using photography.

Does your work reflect on the medium of photography or the photographic image? If so, is that intentional?

Yes. When I use a found image in my work, there is a very direct interaction with photographic history and culture. I am very interested in the conventions and cliches of the medium. For example, to make the images in the Drape series, I worked with vintage pin up images in Photoshop. Although the possibilities are endless when making digital images, I chose to only work with what was already found within the frame of the original photograph. I copied and pasted sections of the curtain, extending it over the figure. These vintage photographs come with a set of routine poses and studio conventions that are already well known. I hope that my extensions and erasures within these familiar pictures reveal unexpected aspects of the original images and open up new spaces for exploring the imagery.

Are you interested in the notion of your pictures as objects? Do you think about how their physicality may endure as you are photographing them or is that an afterthought?

My work has a sculptural quality, based on the cutting of two dimensional imagery. Collage is an inherently spatial/sculptural practice. I have also made work in which core elements of found photographic pictures are used to make tactile, tangible objects - crossing the divide from a two dimensional picture to physical space. An example is my work Split. It started with a found photograph, a pin-up picture depicting a woman on a bed. I then made a new version of the flowery pattern on the bed, printed it as a cotton fabric and used it to reupholster an actual chair, which is then placed in front of the photograph. In a sense the photograph comes out into the real world. The viewer is invited to sit on the chair, and in this way the viewer becomes enveloped by the photograph itself. I consider many of my works as objects from the start - scale and positioning of works within space, for example a gallery, a billboard or a home, is part of the planning when making a work. Some works turn out to be more maleable, and can take on several different forms. Endurance is not my main concern, not everything is made to last.

Often sculptural photographic works are concerned with elevating banal objects, situations or events to a status of ‘art’ – when does something become art for you?

I think I know it is art when I cannot quite figure out the full meaning of the work, of what I just made. It has something that feels really important yet cannot be fully articulated.

Eva Stenram manipulates found mid-century erotic photographs, subverting their original function to scrutinise the idea of absence and the objectification and fragmentation of the body. In her ongoing series Drape (2011 –…), Stenram conceals explicit nudity by digitally altering her source material, creating a rupture within each scene. Transforming the relationship between model and environment by transposing foreground and background, Stenram heightens the element of fantasy in her images. Stenram is a Swedish-British visual artist who lives in Berlin. She studied in London at the Royal College of Art (MA, Photography) and the Slade School of Fine Art (BA, Fine Art). Her art practice revolves around photography and post-production, investigating the codes, desires and ideologies at play within the construction of the photographic image. Stenram’s work has been exhibited worldwide as part of important group exhibitions, including a touring exhibition. She has been awarded several prizes for her work, and in 2019, she was selected as one of the 100 Heroines of contemporary global photography by the Royal Photographic Society.