Jonas Bendiksen

Veles is a provincial North Macedonian town of 40,000 inhabitants which placed itself on the world map in 2016 as an epicenter for fake news production. The town has lost much of its economic base in recent decades —an enormous steel smelter, a porcelain factory and other industry lie abandoned. During the 2016 US Presidential election, tech-savvy local youth created hundreds of clickbait websites posing as American political news portals, intending to earn quick money from viewer ad clicks. As the Veles fake news articles were spread to millions of people via Facebook and Twitter algorithms, many of these “news hackers” made substantial sums, and the sites may very well have contributed to the election of Donald Trump as president of the USA.

I travelled to Veles to explore this unlikely hub of misinformation. The photographs of contemporary Veles are intertwined with excerpts and facsimiles from a 1919 archaeological discovery also called ‘the Book of Veles’ — a cryptic collection of 40 ‘ancient’ wooden boards discovered in Russia by an army officer, written in a proto-Slavic language. It was claimed to be a history of the Slavic people and the god Veles himself—the pre-Christian Slavic god mischief, chaos and deception. While popular among Slavic nationalists, the text is debunked as a forgery by most scientists.

In my ‘new’ Book of Veles I interweave these two different ‘Veles’ stories, representing historical and current efforts at producing disinformation and chaos.… (meer)

Imagined as a sequel to the Old and New Testaments of the Bible by Magnum photographer Jonas Bendiksen, The Last Testament features visual accounts and stories of seven men around the world who claim to be the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Building on biblical form and structure, chapters dedicated to each Jesus include excerpts of their scriptural testaments, laying out their theology and demands on mankind in their own words.

Through Bendiksen’s personal testimonies and intimate portraits, The Last Testament investigates the boundaries of religious faith, and a world in need of salvation, yearning for a new prophet. Whether escaping an angry mob in the streets with the Jesus of Kitwe, joining a Messianic birthday pilgrimage in Siberia, or witnessing the End of Days with Moses in South Africa, Bendiksen immerses himself among the disciples of each Jesus. He takes at face value that each is the one true Messiah returned to Earth, to forge an account that’s both a work of apocalyptic journalism and of a compelling artistic imagination.
A GOST book published by Aperture.… (meer)

This culmination of a fascinating seven-year photographic journey takes viewers through the countries and enclaves once held in orbit by the immense gravity of Moscow, the nucleus of the Soviet empire. Now each region is on its own in a chaotic political environment, sometimes without diplomatic recognition from neighbors, much less the international community. Abkhazia, an unrecognized country on the Black Sea, was once the natural pearl of the empire, where bellicose generals and productive factory managers came to relax. The spacecraft crash zones between Russia and Kazakhstan reveal a Soviet-inflected version of the entrepreneurial spirit. In Transdniester, a breakaway region of Moldova that survives by functioning as a giant black market for illicit traffic in all manner of goods, from leftover Soviet munitions to bootlegged booze, Bendiksen was expelled on the grounds that he was a "protagonist in an international spy ring." These 62 hauntingly beautiful and often arresting color photographs unsentimentally reveal the often grim circumstances in these half-forgotten regions, uniformly poor and polluted, and often politically unstable. We may not hear much about them today, but we will certainly hear more as the fall of the Iron Curtain continues to reverberate throughout the region.… (meer)