Eva Bensasson, through her digitally manipulated large-scale photographs, explores issues such as the relation between the individual and the social bodies, the politics of the public space in urban settings, and the often veiled connections established throughout history between power, social control and the urban planning of iconic city centres. The artist also deals with questions related to the individual’s simultaneous physical presence and effacing anonymity in the context of the social dynamic of crowds and gatherings in major cities.

Bensasson’s photographic manipulations disruptively deprive the individual, which is found in the crowded public space, of any individuality by paradoxically marking its precise place in the urban landscape as a black human-shaped object. Transparent despite their blackness, these anonymous and silent walking objects seem to lose any possibility of actual movement and real connection with both the body of the other and the physical body of the city, which, inhabited by ghostly figures, ultimately becomes an uncanny space of discomfort and estrangement.

More recently, Bensasson focussed on Trafalgar Square and its relations, both present and historical, with power, national identity, duty and war. Recalling Nelson’s signal in the context of the battle of Trafalgar, according to which ‘England Expects That Every Man Will Do His Duty’, as well as recent anti-war movements, the artist called attention to the contrasting roles ascribed to this place by those in power and those in protest.