Between 2005 and 2012, Roman Bezjak has travelled across East and Southeast Europe and the eastern part of Germany, searching for buildings that could be categorized as representative examples of the architecture of socialist modernism. He created a vast oeuvre of photographs that visualizes the archaeology of this modernism in its own way. He took photographs of apartment buildings, hotels, cultural venues and similar architectures, functioning in the public sphere. Looking at his work, a utopian vocabulary of forms comes to notice, implying an architectural monotony of that era. Bezjak’s photographs reveal the visible wear and tear of the utopian and its placement in our everyday life. In 2012 Roman Bezjak continued his visual research of socialist architecture in Pyongyang and in 2017 in Taschkent. This two new bodies of works has been enhanced by his latest work in Skopje, where in the last seven years the postwar modern city has got partly a face-lifting to a neo-classical and neo-baroque appeal.

Roman Bezjak, born 1962 in Ptuj, SR Slovenia, Yugoslavia, worked for many years as a freelance photographer for various German and international magazines and is since 2000 professor of photography at the University of Applied Sciences in Bielefeld, Germany. Since 2012 he is the dean of the Faculty of Art and Design. He lives in Hamburg.