Images and text by Zsofia Daniel
Made in collaboration with FORMAT Festival
History usually doesn't announce itself with a bang. Mostly, it happens in the background of daily life.
I didn't grow up studying the specifics of the interwar period. At the time, it wasn't possible. Our textbooks stopped being factual or nuanced about the times after World War I. What came after 1918 was sanitised, smoothed over the domino effect that led to the Second World War and the Soviet times. The official narrative spoke of "large forces" tormenting a great nation that had already suffered enough.
However, somehow, some people still found a way to talk about the truth. It was coded in music, in poetry and in the lines that never said what they meant. Growing up in a place that tried—and failed —to face its own history teaches one to notice things. Like the way certain vibes repeat, building familiar patterns, even when they are called differently.
These familiar vibes and patterns today are more than concerning. Far-right parties are winning elections across Europe. Democratic institutions are being hollowed out. The invasion of Ukraine and the language used to justify it—if you know about the Sudetenland and Austria's Annexation, it lands differently. Civilians are being targeted in Ukraine and the Middle East (indefensibly by those whose parents and grandparents suffered through the Holocaust and WWII), multiplying the horrors of Guernica and Almería.
The pandemic exposed the same fractures and class inequality that the Spanish flu and the 1929 crash did. Just like the US industry flourished in the 1920s without regulation before the market collapse, today's tech giants thrive in a regulatory vacuum, monetising the very divisions that threaten democracy.
Now, advanced surveillance systems gather the data that feeds social credit mechanisms, turning behaviour into a score that dictates access and freedom—replacing the physical files and lists of the past with a digital verdict rendered by an algorithm. At the same time, "community fact-checking" has become the norm, turning objective facts into a popularity vote, while AI-generated content makes it impossible to distinguish fact from relentless propaganda.
Behind it all, data and algorithms have become commodities, traded for profit to amplify division and enforce conformity faster than any regime ever could by simply limiting radio frequencies or coercing neighbours to inform on each other. The tools are new, but the trajectory feels very familiar.
Like in the interwar period, today’s circumstances may push people to stay silent and complicit. But there is always a way to act: quietly, outside of the spotlight, or hidden between the lines.
’31 does not reenact historical events. Instead, it blends inspirations from the interwar literature, paintings, and photography and today’s socio-political events.
To visually blend past and present, original objects from the 1920s and 1930s, such as radios, newspapers, suitcases, and clothing, find their way into modern settings. Such physical staging is selectively combined with digital collage, incorporating historical and archival fragments. These historic elements operate as hidden clues within the frame, requiring the viewer to look closely to discover them. The project's visual language returns to the constructed realities of the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit), utilising staged tableaux and resulting objects to reveal these historical layers.
This project refuses to provide easy answers or straightforward conclusions. By flattening the distance between past and present, the work leaves the final resolution open. It presents our time as a crossroad where the viewer must decide where we go from here
Zsofia Daniel
Born in Eastern Europe and based near Zürich, Switzerland, Zsofia Daniel is a self-taught multimedia artist whose work employs photography to explore societal and political themes. Drawing on historical and cultural research, her multi-layered, tableaux-like images make use of colour, light, and art direction to create open-ended narratives. The scenes are the result of thorough research and historical study, yet viewers are invited to draw their own conclusions.
Daniel's practice extends beyond flat photographic prints into 3D photo-objects, mixed-media works, film and sound installations. Her sources of inspiration include everyday life and the history of photography, as well as painting, sculpture, novels, music and cinema.
Her work has been exhibited throughout Europe and Asia and recognised by several photography prizes, including a Prix Pictet nomination in 2025 and the Daylight Award 2026 (FORMAT Festival & Daylight Publishing). She has been shortlisted for the Belfast Photo Festival in 2024 and 2026, and longlisted for the Aesthetica Art Prize.
