Barbara Bjelis is a designer and artist from Croatia, living in Oslo, Norway. She holds an MA in Visual Communication from the Zagreb School of Design. Her work has been exhibited internationally including a solo exhibition in Cetinje, Montenegro and group exhibitions, notably as a selected artist at Drava Art Biennale, D-Day, Mexican Museum of Design, World Biennial of Student Photography, Zagreb Design Week, I Never Read Basel and others. She was an Artist-in-Residence at Possible Futures Residency in collaboration with the Art Academy in Leipzig. Her works have been included in several books, most recent being ‘100 Photos of Europe’, published by Culturale Lab in March 2026.

Afterlight is a film-based series created entirely through double exposure, made with a small analogue Konica loaded with BW ISO 100 film. The camera itself is imperfect and its exposures are unpredictable. Fragments of film are exposed, then reloaded using a film retractor. Because the highlights of the first exposure are already spent, the second exposure fills only the shadow areas, making the final image a process of filling in the missing parts rather than simply overlaying two scenes. These images collapse multiple experiences: places, bodies and seasons. Place acts not just as a backdrop; it arrives with historical and emotional weight, and it presses back on the image it meets. In a time when anything can be generated instantly, and the experiment risks becoming immaterial, the artist now becomes the protestor. Through this process, she asks if it is possible to show everything, all at once; in an attempt to map the density of her own thought.

www.studiokanu.com/afterlight
www.instagram.com/afterlighttttt