Gallery Entry
Artworks and Black and White Photography
By Alina Suleimen · KZ
The submitted work brings together two connected bodies of practice: a portfolio of original physical paintings and a photographic portfolio entitled Dreams in White and Black. The paintings are materially grounded works created through traditional processes and physical media. They explore memory, vulnerability, war, solitude, landscape, human presence and the fragile boundary between beauty and loss. Across figurative and more symbolic works, I am interested in how emotion survives inside objects, bodies, gestures and places, and in how an image can carry traces of history without becoming merely illustrative. Dreams in White and Black develops these concerns through photography and digital image-making. The portfolio moves through sea, landscape, architecture, human figures, migration, mourning and disappearance. Works such as Tidal Procession, White Sail, Towards the Sea, The Last Crossing, The Flood, Mourning Flower, Morning Mist and Time Is an Illusion are conceived as individual images but also as parts of a wider visual meditation on passage: between places, between memory and forgetting, between presence and absence, and between survival and loss. Some photographs were created conventionally, while selected images involved AI-assisted development or post-production. I used AI selectively as one element within a broader artistic process rather than as an autonomous generator of meaning. The source material, visual concepts, subject choices, framing, narrative intention, editing decisions and final selection remained mine. In some cases, AI helped me test monochrome transformations, tonal atmosphere, compositional adjustments, removal or alteration of specific visual elements, or alternative interpretations of my own source imagery and artworks. The relationship between the two portfolios is important to me. The physical paintings demonstrate the traditional and material foundation of my practice; the photographic and AI-assisted works show how that practice can expand into newer tools without surrendering authorship. The technology changes, but the central concerns remain the same: human memory, grief, endurance, moral uncertainty, landscape, war, migration, solitude and the attempt to preserve something deeply human inside an image. Together, the portfolios ask whether new technologies alter the nature of authorship, or whether authorship still resides in the choices a person makes: what to imagine, what to retain, what to reject, what to transform, and what ultimately deserves to remain.
- Category
- VISUAL ART
- Approved
- 6 October 2026
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