Sleeping Beauty by Stéphanie Hubert is a deeply personal and poetic exploration of loss, memory, and grief. The project combines documentary photography, sound, writing, and artificial intelligence to evoke the invisible traces left by absence.
Beginning with a graphic reportage in a hospital setting, the work evolved into an immersive, experimental installation. Some images remain untouched, silent witnesses to the experience of departure; others are digitally transformed using AI-generated patterns, mirroring the emotional dissolution of memory over time.
Rather than distorting reality, the artist uses digital techniques to amplify emotional truth, creating a visual and sonic dialogue between what is seen, felt, and remembered. Sleeping Beauty reflects on the role of photography in documenting what gradually disappears and suggests that grief may find form not only in what remains visible, but in what is carefully reconstructed through presence, absence, and imagination.
This exhibition is presented as part of Press the Shutter, Type the Prompt: Photography & Truth in Times of AI, organised by Goran Gaber, Andrew Cusworth, and Anne-Sophie Gabillas within the Channels of Digital Scholarship initiative by the Maison Française d’Oxford and Digital Scholarship @Oxford. It brings together international artists who explore generative AI as a tool, a narrative device, a critical lens, and a poetic medium — revealing fresh possibilities at the intersection of art, technology, and storytelling.
Exhibition on view: 4 November – 5 December
Maison Française d’Oxford
Opening hours:
Mon–Fri, 9am–5pm
Sat 8 Nov & Sat 22 Nov, 1–5pm
