Salonul de proiecte continues its series of exhibitions that bring experienced artists face to face with artists at the start of their careers. This time, Ciprian Mureșan and Enric Fort Ballester were invited to develop a dialogue that involves the realisation of new works, presented alongside a number of existing works. The two worked together at the University of Art in Braunschweig (Germany), where Enric Fort Ballester was supervised by Ciprian Mureșan, who taught there for a year.
Ciprian Mureșan constructs a puppet play based on stories imagined by children in workshops held weeks before shooting the video. In this situation, the roles are reversed: whereas originally it was the children who improvised using the puppets, in the film puppeteers manipulate children-puppets according to the scripts constructed during the workshops. In the exhibition, the performance will be presented in the form of a video, and on 24 June the puppeteers will give a live performance of the action captured in the film. In tandem with this work, the exhibition will also feature the film The Rhinoceroses (2006), which contextualises Mureșan’s work with theatrical convention, as well as his reading of this convention through the filter of the language and behaviour of children. The gloomy vision of society to be found in the original play is temporarily suspended (or amplified, depending on the angle of interpretation) by a collective of children, who read the comical-absurd parts of the characters in the Ionesco play.
We can find the same type of dramatic vision in the film Dog Luv (2009), where dog-puppets become the agents of a self-destructive human race.
A shared interest in performative practices associated with different forms of language, which are meant to destabilize and question the communication function of language, is what connects the two artists. Enric Fort Ballester conceives a work setting out from recordings without sound, whose protagonists are people talking to themselves in public spaces. The final result, which consists in the fictionalisation of this material, will be presented in the exhibition alongside the intermediate working stages involving the decoding of these messages without any addressee, exploring the division between speaker and listener. Throughout the duration of the exhibition, new elements of this difficult and ambitious undertaking will be progressively unveiled. The practices of the two artists converge in the adoption of working methods that consist in the staging of situations whose inherent quota of chance and unpredictability is processed via subsequent dramatization. Fort Ballester’s new project is complemented in the exhibition by a series of drawings and a film, works that convey the artist’s interest in the accelerated precariousness induced by vectors of globalisation.
Ciprian Mureșan's new piece is co-produced by the David Nolan Gallery in New York and will be presented at this year’s Art Basel in June.