17 May – 19 June 2013

Opening and conversation: Friday, 17 May at 7 pm

7 pm: conversation with Roman Bezjak and Matevž Čelik, director of Museum of Architecture and Design Ljubljana & presentation of the monograph published by Hatje Cantz Verlag last year.

8 pm: opening of the exhibition

For the first time Roman Bezjak, Slovenian born artist who lives and works in Germany, will be presented with a solo show in Ljubljana.

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.

Inka Schube

In 2011 the book was published for Hatje Cantz Verlag; the same year Bezjak was awarded with the international DAM Architectural Book Award 2011!

17.5. – 19.6. 2013

The project realised in collaboration with Goethe Institut.