In this series, I encounter fragments of myself. The figures that appear in the images do not exist — they were generated by artificial intelligence, which invents faces and bodies that resemble real biographies yet have never had one. It is precisely there that I find a mirror of my own story: a biography stretched between nations, languages, and cultural spaces, where hybrid, fragile, and ultimately lost identities took shape.
I deliberately chose to generate these images with AI because I know the feeling of being a generated subject myself — composed of contradictory traditions, of uprootings, of places where I never truly arrived. I am not Austrian, but I am no longer Croatian either. I am something third, an in-between being, a projection, a construction. A self that came into being much like the people in these images: artificial, unique, superficially real and yet profoundly unreal.
My migration story is accompanied by moments of depersonalization and derealization — states in which the world feels like a false film and one perceives oneself as a marginal figure in one’s own life. This sense of a subtle, uncanny displacement forms the inner core of the series.
Searching for my roots, for a female self, for a stable self-image, I looked at old photographs and repressed memories and found only shells, shadows, splintered outlines, blurred or missing faces. This emptiness repeats itself in the AI portraits: subjects without recognizability, without origin, without clear belonging.
My images do not depict people, but states of being. They reveal the in-between space in which identity emerges: where memory fractures, origin dissolves, migration blurs lines, and technology generates new illusions. They are portraits of figures that exist as I do: half real, half algorithmic, half memory, half projection. In the white noise of the AI, in the dust of time, and in the rupture between past and future, this series searches for a self — and finds the contour-like trace of a face that never fully appears.
Winter 2025