Architecture can be a form of power. This is the intuition Evelyn Bencicova starts from for Asymptote, the series in which she investigates the visual and psychological legacy of the socialist era, turning monumental buildings and anonymous bodies into a single, glacial composition.
Born in Bratislava in 1992, and therefore after the end of the regime, the Slovak photographer and artist trained in Vienna, between fine art and new media. In 2016 she won the Hasselblad Masters and completed Asymptote itself, created in collaboration with art director Adam Csoka Keller.
The starting point for this work, still very relevant today, is architectural sites from the socialist era. Places that were symbols of power and grandeur, designed to make the person passing through them feel small, and that today stand still, stripped of their original purpose, abandoned or forgotten like gravestones of a past glory.
At the heart of the project lies a historical framework in dialogue with a fictional scenario, to the point of blurring the line between reality and memory. Authentic testimonies and archive materials are reinterpreted through contemporary digital language, in a fiction grounded in truth.
The aim goes beyond looking backward. Evelyn Bencicova wants above all to speak about the current state of post-Soviet societies and their values, through themes such as paranoia, surveillance, uniformity, normalisation and censorship. All of them are fruits of a cultural legacy that continues to shape situations, thoughts and behaviours today.
In the photographs of Asymptote the bodies are never the protagonists. They are folded and distributed through space until they form a coherent geometry, which itself becomes a symbol of the regime. The people form a pattern, each stripped of their individuality to become a unified form, and in such a society every difference is an anomaly in the system.
The effect is reinforced by symmetries, identical masks, cold and faded palettes. Leaning against railings and walls, the figures merge with the structure and create an emotional architecture, where arms and legs seem at once mechanical and melancholic. The result is an unsettling world, in which the organic and the concrete clash and personal autonomy collides with a community mindset.
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