23rd February – 13th March 2026
Set up photos: Ivan Buvinić
In tourist regions, space is shaped by the logic of temporary stay. Spatial infrastructures, designed for intensive but short-term use, lose their purpose outside the tourist season. When the traces of seasonal life disappear, these places become like stage sets – form without content or people.
The exhibition Placeholders draws inspiration from spaces like these: places on hold, infrastructure without users, and elements of the built environment whose function has been temporarily suspended. The photographs depict embankments, concrete structures, technical facilities, and transitional zones – spaces between the built and the natural environment – captured in tourist regions of France at moments when their purpose briefly vanishes. Responding intuitively to the landscape she is in, Eva Šustar records its formal tensions, pauses, and interim states. In this work, photography does not appear as a neutral tool of documentation, but as a medium that atomizes, isolates, and suspends the functional logic of the touristified site, producing a space that exists primarily as an image.
However, in this series the photographs do not function only as images, but also as objects. Their materiality, format, and mode of display shape meaning directly, erasing a clear boundary between a documentary and a conceptual approach. Although they start from real, recognizable places, the photographs do not affirm them as stable or unambiguous scenes. On the contrary, through the extraction of motifs, shifts in scale, and the spatial relationships within the exhibition layout, they produce a sculptural effect: the scenes appear as volumes, surfaces, and structures that occupy space, rather than merely representing it. This hybrid approach resonates with the theme of space without function, in a state of suspension, because photography – like the depicted places – oscillates between use and autonomy, between document and object.
Changes in space often take place quietly and gradually, almost imperceptibly, until they become irreversible. The public environments we move through every day – like streets, waterfronts, parking areas, and in-between zones – change their role and meaning, often without our noticing, precisely because they appear familiar to us. The artist does not offer explanations or conclusions about the fate of these locations; instead, she turns attention to what usually remains overlooked – spaces where social, economic, and spatial changes are already underway, but have not yet been recognized as a problem. In this sense, Placeholders proposes another way of reading the landscape: not through what it promises or represents, but through what it is quietly, progressively ceasing to be.
Tena Starčević
Eva Šustar (Rijeka, 2001) is an artist working in the field of contemporary photography. After completing her undergraduate degree in Cinematography at the Academy of Dramatic Art, University of Zagreb, she continued her studies at the École nationale supérieure de la photographie in Arles, where she currently lives and works. She has exhibited in group exhibitions in Croatia and France, and in 2023 held her first solo exhibition at Galerija Crta (Zagreb). From 2024 to 2025, she worked as an assistant at the Rencontres de la photographie d’Arles.
