HEROSIM RISES IN
A WAREHOUSE
5 march – 24 may 2015

For this season’s exhibition generated by the open call for emerging artists, Salonul de proiecte invited Mona Vătămanu and Florin Tudor to select the works to be produced for the occasion. A work by the artist Zamir Suleymanov (Azerbaijan) was chosen by Vătămanu and Tudor to guide them in the selection process. Suleymanov’s film is the catalyst for the whole exhibition, which questions from multiple viewpoints the continuity between cinema/film and reality. Documenting the activities that take place in a former cinema converted into a “playground” for young people who seem to spend their whole lives there, the artist makes visible the fact that the space of the cinema—the place where all these things happen—has been invaded by reality. By extension, the space of the exhibition is one in which the fissures in reality become visible, comprising multiple incursions into zones of social exclusion or putting together proposals aimed at transforming reality’s immediate givens.

Ion Dumitrescu and Florin Flueraș present a recording of a collective action that took place on the 1st of December 2010 at the AFI Palace Cotroceni mall in Bucharest, a subversive infiltration of the regime of the spectacle that characterises contemporary existence, which rests under the sign of rampant capitalism, an infiltration that aimed temporarily to shortcircuit it and provoke reflection about what the “stage sets” and reality in question involve. The decision to show the mall action in the form of a film raises questions about the limits of the postspectacle concept and generates a discussion with the public that is scheduled before the opening of the exhibition. Moving from the spectacle occasioned by the National Day celebrations to spectacles of a religious type, the collective made up of Paul Dunca, Mihai Lukacs and Ștefan Tiron imagine a “parish of the excluded”, which in their eyes reveals and includes the limits of gender and sexuality in the philosophy and practice of religion. This “parish” proposes a series of rituals that will unfold throughout the period of the exhibition.

The contribution of Alexandru Fifea, Cătălin Rulea and David Schwartz draws attention to the practices of another state institution, the police, practices that sometimes become abusive towards people who are ethnically or socially vulnerable.

Setting out from the case of Daniel Dumitrache, who was killed inside a police station, they construct a performance based on fictionalisation of the documentary materials archived during the research. Within the framework of a film-essay with autobiographical overtones, Iulia Toma stages a performance based on a ritual that her father, an army sergeant, meticulously used to perform. She shifts the criticism of institutions found in the previous projects towards a subjective area. The male figure, dominant in public and institutional registers, is absent, almost invisible, in family life. The subjective viewpoint and reflection on the past can also be found in Claudiu Cobilanschi’s documentary essay, which tackles the recent history of the strategic green houses and nurseries around the edge of Bucharest, which were designed during the communist period, but which are now in ruins, overrun with weeds and mounds of rubbish. For Irina Gheorghe, science and technology, important pillars of the socialist utopia, provide the matter for a para-scientific study that is situated at the boundary between the exact sciences and the blurred areas where they are invaded by the inexact, the unknown and the irrational.

Although they seem to form a heterogeneous corpus, traversed by various types of subject and artistic practice, the projects selected by Mona Vătămanu and Florin Tudor are united by the critical attention they pay to the social context. Another example in this direction is the work of Simion Cernica, which captures the moments of respite enjoyed by labourers who work in precarious conditions, moments that are perceived as a collective ritual. Where Cernica draws on a low-budget aesthetic and hidden camerawork from a distance, Ivana Mladenovic draws her subject matter from the social medium, creating a purely spectacular, cinematic moment. The character in her film, Miss Piranda, is filmed in a theatrical way, in a single extended shot, in which seduction manifests itself to an unseen viewer. Navigating through the raucous, libido charged world of turbo-folk, the character’s strategy is to conceal herself by exposing herself, and the film exacerbates precisely this paradox. The idea of the concealed/visible is also a defining feature of the other contributions to the exhibition, which brings to the fore a series of below-the-surface problems that elude the dominant perception of the social space and the public discourse.