“GEN Z: ART IN THE AGE OF AI”

On the occasion of Gen Z: Shaping a New Gaze, Lorane Hochstatter and Alina Frieske, two Gen Z artists, come together with FFF Academy assistant Elinor Zoë Karl to explore how a generation raised with technology navigates the shifting landscape of AI in their artistic practice. How do they negotiate authorship, integrity, and identity when AI is both a tool and a potential rival?

This conversation moves between fascination and unease: the thrill of limitless possibilities alongside questions of guilt, authenticity, and environmental impact. It traces the fragile line between assistance and authorship, between craft and automation, between imagination expanded—and imagination outsourced.

The conversation will be held in English.

Alina Frieske (*1994/ GER) is a Berlin-based artist whose practice blends photography and painting through collage works. In assembling digital photo fragments into newly imagined scenarios and characters, she reflects on the shifting boundaries between public and private identities, the dynamics of the crowd, and the performance of the self within the digital sphere. Alina Frieske holds an MA Photogaphy at the École cantonale d’art Lausanne in Switzerland and a BA in Visual Communication at the Academie Beeldende Kunsten Maastricht in the Netherlands. Her work has since been featured amongst others at Arter Museum Istanbul (2025), Photo Elysée Lausanne (2025), Pipeline Contemporary London (2024), Paris Photo (2024), CPG Geneva (2024), Kunsthal Rotterdam (2022) and Biennale Images Vevey (2020). In 2022, she published her first monograph, “Each and Every Part in Between“, with Ciao Press and Éditions Images Vevey.

Lorane Hochstatter (*2001, Switzerland) is a Geneva-born artist based in London. She completed her MA in Fashion Image at Central Saint Martins in 2025. Working primarily with digital photography, she creates staged and constructed images that blur the boundaries between reality and fiction. Her practice examines how digital culture reshapes perceptions of bodies, identity, and belonging. Rather than documenting reality, she builds ambiguous scenes suspended between the virtual and the physical. Focusing on atmosphere and sensation over narrative clarity, her images feel both seductive and unsettling, inviting multiple interpretations.

Elinor Zoë Karl (*1998, Germany) is currently studying photography at the HfG Offenbach, having previously studied political science. She has been supporting the realisation of the FFF Academy programme since 2025. Artistically, she critically engages with photographic evidence as well as socio-political regimes of gaze and power. Her work “Heiteres aus Kamerun” received an honourable mention at the HfG Rundgang Prize organised by the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation and was recognised by the Willi-Münzenberg Forum Berlin.