The spaces in Ziva Drvaric’s work feel immediately recognisable. We encounter fragments of interiors, domestic objects, architectural details and traces of everyday life. Yet the longer we spend with them, the less certain they become. Something is subtly out of place. A shadow lingers where its source cannot be found. An object appears altered, doubled or suspended between presence and disappearance. The familiar remains intact, but its reliability begins to loosen.

Born in Ljubljana, Slovenia in 1988, Drvaric has developed a practice that explores the relationship between perception, memory and the spaces we inhabit. Working primarily through screen-prints derived from photographs, she transforms ordinary environments into images that exist somewhere between documentation and imagination. Her works do not simply depict a room or an arrangement of things; they register the psychological charge that interiors can hold, and the ways in which spaces absorb traces of experience long after the moment itself has passed.

At the centre of Drvaric’s practice is an interest in thresholds: between inside and outside, presence and absence, certainty and doubt. Her compositions often resemble still life, bringing objects and architectural elements into carefully balanced relation. But rather than describing a scene in fixed terms, they construct an atmosphere in which curtains, lamps, switches, shadows and fragments of furniture begin to operate less as functional objects than as carriers of mood, memory and projection.

Human presence is almost always absent, but never entirely gone. Rooms appear inhabited by traces rather than bodies, while objects seem to retain the memory of use without yielding a clear narrative. What emerges is a sense of eloquent emptiness: spaces shaped not only by what is visible, but by what has been left behind. Drvaric’s works suggest that environments do not simply contain experience, but quietly absorb and reflect it.

Her interventions are subtle, but they are what give the work its tension. Familiar forms become strange without tipping into full abstraction. Scale, framing and juxtaposition destabilise the image from within, allowing reality and imagination to overlap. A room no longer behaves entirely like a room; an object hesitates between utility and symbol. These are not dramatic distortions, but quiet shifts that invite a slower and more attentive form of looking.

What emerges from Drvaric’s practice is a challenge to the way domestic space is usually understood. Rather than treating the home as a fixed site of comfort or orientation, she reveals it as something more unstable: a place where memory, perception and emotion continuously shape what is seen. In this sense, her works invite a more self-aware way of looking, attentive to the ways the familiar can hold ambiguity, tension and estrangement.

Through this quiet destabilisation of ordinary experience, Drvaric opens up a space between intimacy and distance, recognition and uncertainty. Her works do not offer resolution so much as a heightened attentiveness to what lingers at the edge of perception: silence, ambiguity, and the afterlife of objects as active forms of presence.