Socialist modernism

Socialist modernism - Roman Bejzak

Whereas the West encounters the now-fossilized witnesses of planned economies and socialist modernism with skepticism, Roman Bezjak (1962) takes an impartial view of communist architecture. For the past five years the artist has concentrated on traveling through eastern and southeastern Europe. Bezjak used a large-format camera to take photographs of residential buildings, institutions, hotels, and palaces of culture in familiar and foreign places—from Tallinn and Tirana to Dresden and Dnipropetrovsk. His series render a kind of archaeology of postwar modernism without nostalgically glorifying the former East Bloc, for he also makes visible the exploitation of utopia and its entry into everyday life. Socialist Modernism thus captures a world threatened by demolition, parts of which—such as the Palace of the Republic in Berlin—no longer exist.