ABRAHAM ZINER American, b. 1995; lives and works in Frankfurt am Main

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Buzludzha, Armature (1974–1981), 2022 Gelatin silver print on baryta paper, from 6×9 cm negative 35 × 60 cm

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One of the figural sculptures that flanked the approach to the House-Monument of the Bulgarian Communist Party — the saucer-shaped assembly hall built between 1974 and 1981 by Georgi Stoilov at the summit of Mount Buzludzha, and abandoned within a decade of its inauguration. The concrete has weathered to the point that the figure is returning to the steel skeleton it was cast over.

Part of an ongoing series about structures that outlast the people and ideas that produce them. Monuments are made to outlast the lives that conceive them; their forms, however, remain bound — intimately and inescapably — to the convictions of the moment of their making, convictions that rarely outlast the materials. The armature here is both literal and ideological, now equally visible.