A mannequin behind glass, a woman imitating her own reflection, a voice assistant answering every question in a female voice. Evelyn Bencicova has spent years working on this short circuit, the point where the human body and its technological imitation stop being two separate things. The Slovak photographer and artist, born in Bratislava in 1992 and now based between Berlin and a network of international collaborations spanning theatre, fashion and scientific research, builds what she calls symbolic narratives, visual worlds shaped around a precise theoretical question and then translated into images, video, VR installations.

The project Second Virgin, the most recent chapter of her research into artificial intelligence, continues an earlier body of work, Artificial Tears, begun eight years ago on instinct. In that first series, Evelyn Bencicova photographed repeated gestures, imitated poses, the staging of learned behaviour, a way of questioning the difference between independent thought and mechanical imitation, at a moment when artificial intelligence was only beginning to enter everyday life. It was only later, revisiting the work for a show at Kraftwerk Berlin, that the artist noticed something missing. She had built a hybrid figure, half human and half machine, and had made it female without ever asking herself why. A choice that, looking back, felt anything but neutral, and one that pushed the project into a second phase, more explicitly tied to the representation of gender in artificial intelligence.

Where Artificial Tears looked at domestic assistants and their preset female voices, Second Virgin turns its attention to artificial companions and robotic sex work, a territory in which the newest technology makes an old mechanism even more explicit, the one by which the female body is programmed to please, to respond, to serve. Bencicova works this grey zone by questioning the objectification of bodies, of emotions, and ultimately of ourselves, asking how far each of us is becoming, within our own relationship with technology, a tool, a project, or simply a customer.

What sets Evelyn Bencicova’s work apart is the method behind it. It starts with an intuition, often tied to a daily observation or a feeling that’s hard to name. A more rigorous phase of study follows, made of reading, site visits, conversations, in which the artist tries to immerse herself in the subject on both a physical and a theoretical level, drawing on references such as Turing’s reflections on the boundary between thought and imitation. Only at the end does the translation into image take place.