Merror: The Hybrid of Mirror and Error

Today, a walk through the Fotografiska museum will first take you through exhibits displaying beautiful portraits of fashion models, followed by an exhibit with awe-inspiring conservation photographs of the ocean and its creatures. While viewing these first few exhibits, I appreciated the technical savvy behind the work, but nothing felt quite as surprising, surreal, and masterful as Evelyn Bencicova’s exhibit Merror.

Right as you enter the exhibit, you are greeted by a chilling display of a few photographs from a larger series titled Ecce Homo. In each photograph in the series, naked models, always with hidden faces, appear stacked, piled, or interwoven in the midst of a sterile and bleak environment.

One such photograph depicts models woven on top of a desk in a muted brown conference room, with harsh fluorescent lights lining the top of the frame. Bencicova calls her work ‘fictions based on truth.’ Influenced by her upbringing in post-Soviet Slovakia, this photograph from Ecce Homo instills a fear of a deindividualized world. In a room full of distinct lines and sharp corners, the curves of the models' bodies naturally relieve a viewer's eyes, but ultimately fail to bring relief to the grotesque mood. Ghostly pale and without faces, it feels as though the bodies are oppressed by the room they are placed in. You might leave wondering, if this photograph were part of a longer story, would the bodies in this scene appear less and less human as time goes on?

Bencicova’s favorite themes seem to revolve around the idea of identical human copies. In her series Asymptote, she uses less grotesque but equally surreal scenes to ask her viewer to question conformity. One photograph from the series has children standing in line before a bench, with matching sportswear on. The children are wearing identical masks and all appear to be hunched forward.

At first, the photograph doesn’t appear as shocking or chilling compared to the shots from Ecce Homo. After all, seeing children in matching gym clothes is not unusual, and wearing a gym uniform is something many of us have personally experienced. What takes this photograph beyond the image is the story it offers. Though children in school are all expected to follow a similar and strict path, we see in this photo how matching outfits fail to conceal their differences. The children still have different heights and postures, which reveal something about their personalities. We begin to question why we expect our systems of education to be uniform for these multifaceted beings.

Overall, Merror is a refreshing exhibit that invites its audience to investigate their society, play with their imagination, and become a storyteller. At first frustrated, I now feel thankful that Bencicova displays her work without explanation. In her words, her work is all about "a little fraction, a little crack which is destroying the perfection, and it’s barely visible but it’s actually the way inside, the way deeper, the way under the surface where you can find what is really important."