In this work, I examine the photographic representation of women in psychiatric institutions and the power relations between physician-photographer and photographed female patients. The project draws on 19th-century photographic archives, particularly from the Salpêtrière Hospital, which contains an extensive photographic archive of women diagnosed with hysteria. Derived from the Greek hystera (uterus), hysteria was long believed to be a disorder caused by a wandering uterus. Physicians, captivated by the supposed objectivity of photography, often provoked symptoms and seizures during photographic sessions. What was intended as clinical documentation became a choreographed, theatrical spectacle of contorted bodies, with countless repetitions and stagings. By re-enacting archival photographs, I position myself as both subject and operator of the camera, using a visible cable release to disrupt conventional hierarchies between photographer and photographed. Beneath the photographs, I inscribe excerpts from physicians’ case descriptions of photographed women. The accompanying artist’s booklet reframes archival fragments to construct a speculative archive of hysteria, situated between fact and fiction, document and performance, reality and dream. This project examines the enduring impact of institutional practices on contemporary understandings of mental health and the female body, seeking ways to reclaim histories embedded in collective female experience.

DUET is a photographic exploration of creation and decay, a visual meditation on construction and deconstruction occurring simultaneously between two adjacent buildings. The project started from a singular vantage point: my home on the 19th floor of a high-rise in Zagreb, colloquially known as Trešnjevka Beauty, designed by architect Slavko Jelinek and constructed in 1969. Despite its architectural significance, the building has never been renovated and is crumbling under the forces of time and neglect. Directly beside it, a new residential building is being constructed. Photographing the neighboring construction site over several months, I became captivated by its surreal, stage-like qualities: a carefully orchestrated environment infused with the unpredictability of daily labor, accidents, repairs, and adjustments, transforming the site into a space of human endeavor and revealing the invisible forces that sustain creation. In response to this outward expansion, I turned inward. While photographing the macrocosm of the rising structure, I simultaneously documented the microcosm of my own building from the inside out. Details of decay—cracks, worn surfaces, failing materials—form a counterpoint to the polished promise of the new. Through this visual juxtaposition, the project invites the viewer to witness the parallel lives of the buildings, to consider the hidden rhythms that govern change, and to contemplate how spaces—like performers in a duet—exist in relation to one another, responding to time, labor, and chance. Duet is a visual tale of impermanence, the passage of time, and the quiet poetic paradoxes embedded in everyday life.

Compared to other life forms, knots display a concerning lack of interest in disguising the conditions of their undoing. Disaster is their trajectory. A totalizing and worldly allergy to integrity and permanence in time (without ulterior, otherworldly motives) that always leads to a series of asymmetrical exchanges: rewind and destination, discipline and supervision, precariousness and security, explicit and prudish, letting loose and holding together. Their bodily counterparts can be easily spotted: fabrics, subjection and subjectification, tangled hair, lapsus, crossed fingers, the folding of protein, DNA, crossroads, intercourses, crossed eyes, a barely choreographed eternal return (you know that image of the snake channeling the dog inside of itself and biting its own tail? something similar to that). The “true” knot is a topology without allegiance to its host, a machinic hermeticism that treats matter as an interchangeable substrate. Rope, the hair, the chain — only the soft tissue of its embodiment. Its loops are not “forms” but encrypted instructions. The knot does not so much exist as it executes itself, performing a series of operations whose end-state is already written into their inception. Each (knot) stages a micro-extinction event, where the end is not a catastrophe but a banal unbinding into other forms. Considered under this half-gnostic, half-winterly light, the knot is not the solution but a fleeting condensation of a problem that is older than life and will outlast it — the problem of how to hold together what will inevitably come apart. Edited extracts of a text by Davide Andreatta

The series of photographs White Smoke, Brown Glare (2024) explores the city of promised dreams and how these promises of success often remain out of reach. The artist spent a month at an art residency in New York City, the urban jungle that never sleeps, using his camera to capture its pulse. His photographs belong to the tradition of documentary and street photography but with a distinct personal touch. The series observes the inhabitants’ pursuit of the American Dream while reflecting on the artist’s own experience through diary notes, thoughts, and haikus written in charcoal directly on gallery walls. His photographs witness the rather positive aspects of brutal gentrification and stratification of the city; one of the few weapons against its hyper-capitalistic rhythm are strong communities that provide belonging and shelter. The photographs reveal the city’s fabric, where harshness and warmth intertwine; they capture moments when people resist inequality, showing how small communities enable survival and preserve humanity in a demanding environment. Neubauer documents everyday life, blending individual experience with broader social reality. The city becomes both a stage for ambition and a space where challenge meets hope, mirroring brutality and compassion.

There are no photographs from the year my sisters, eight and ten at the time, fled Sarajevo at the beginning of the Bosnian War. What remains is a diary, written by my oldest sister. She wrote through displacement, and that writing became the only testimony in our family archive that speaks to a time I did not witness but have come to know through her words and the stories passed down within our family—a time that has deeply impacted the course of our lives and continues to shape my sense of family, identity, and belonging. The diary covers a period from spring 1992 to winter 1993, during which they moved through several temporary homes across Croatia before eventually settling in Zagreb. In Dear Orchid, I return to these places with my other sister and our father. Using the diary as a guide, we traced a path from Sarajevo to Hvar, Jelsa, and finally Zagreb, revisiting landscapes carrying the memory of their displacement. This journey became the foundation for Dear Orchid, a body of work comprising an 18-minute film, a series of photographs and a publication. This act of return, personal, political, and embodied—asks how the postwar generation might carry its inheritances with care and responsibility. To engage with the archive is to engage with history not as past, but as structure, active, transmitted, and embedded in the present, carried through generations of sisterhood. The archive, like grief, demands to be held, as something unfinished, unresolved, and still urgently alive.