Inka Schube

Christian Raabe

Roman Bezjak

Till Briegleb

Whereas the West encounters the now-fossilized witnesses of planned economies and socialist modernism with skepticism, Roman Bezjak (*1962 in Slovenia) takes an impartial view of communist architecture. After producing prizewinning photo essays for GEO and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 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. This publication thus captures a world threatened by demolition, parts of which--such as the Palace of the Republic in Berlin--no longer exist.

Archäologie Einer Zeit

After centuries of repeated partition of Europe, the next few years will see the admission to the European Union of the following "first-tier candidates for entry": Estonia, Poland, Slovenia, Cyprus, the Czech Republic and Hungary. Last year twelve curious students (of photography and journalism) travelled through those countries to document in texts and pictures local conditions and attitudes on the eve of EU entry.

Roman Bezjak

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