The Slovak photographer explores the loneliness of the human experience in ultra-careful, colour-saturated stagings that plunge us into the heart of socialist-era architecture.
Maria Svarbova was born in Slovakia in the twilight of the 1980s, on the eve of the collapse of the Soviet bloc. She grew up in a country where monuments have left their mark on the urban landscape. For the past fifteen years, this former student of art conservation and archaeology has devoted herself to photography. Her series probe the solitude of human beings and the isolation of contemporary life, which she projects into dreamlike worlds that shed light on socialist architecture. It was with her “Swimming Pool” series (2014) that she came to international attention, winning the Hasselblad Masters competition in 2018. The following year, she presented these famous hypnotic shots of bathers within the vanished pools of her native land for her first solo exhibition at the Minnesota Marine Art Museum in the United States. Her stagings capture the eye. Her meticulous compositions in pastel colours combine the individuality of his figures with the symbolic asceticism and cold rationality of built environments. Time may seem to freeze, but it underlines its own timelessness and relativity. Past, present and dystopian future collide, exploring the loneliness of the human experience.
BETWEEN EMOTION AND TENSION
Her portfolio is a corpus of images bathed in light, transcending her emotionless subjects, often engaged in “banal, stereotyped and choreographed” activities. With “Human Space (2015)”, she explores the individual as the creator of human space. She draws on the architecture of the Slovak Radio building in Bratislava, built between 1967 and 1983. Her subjects present themselves as rebels in search of hope for a new era, attempting to blend into their surroundings, to the point of levitating and even floating. The “Butcher” series, created in Slepčany, the village where she grew up, is a set built by scenographer Zuzana Hudakova in an old butcher’s shop that Maria Svarbova visited as a child. As for “Fragile Concrete (2021)”, this time the series takes off for France and focuses on the “vertical village” designed by Le Corbusier in Marseille’s Ville Radieuse. Through modernist aesthetics and social distancing, Maria Svarbova continues to probe the relationship between the human being and the “living machine”. All these nostalgic, sanitised environments, nourished by human interaction, create a silent, unspoken tension that is her trademark.
Crédits photos © Maria Svarbova