FLAG (ro: „work sets one free”)
installation, acrylic on canvas, mirror, 2010.

In FLAG, the gaze falls over the shoulder on an event that happens behind the viewer. The tunnel from the journey towards extermination of jews in the 2nd World War becomes the hole in the Romanian revolutionary flag of December 1989. Between the two moments there is an historic void, a gap that disolves humanity and the individual. A certain History is always happening behind our back, out of our sight. It is the History of the Nation and of nationalism. It assumes the passivity and the lack of responsability of the individual. He becomes the subject that works not to become free, but rather to be enslaved. He works for the cynicism of this History where Good and Evil become ambigous: the holocaust coincides with the revolution.

anti-windows

anti-windows
together with Arnold Schlachter, video, 13’, 2010.

Anti-windows is a documentation of all the bricked up windows in the area surrounding the Carol Park.

Taking long strolls through the neighborhood we recorded all the windows that are walled up completely and are part of buildings in use. The anti-window is, thus, a bricked up window, an obturated path of the passerby’s gaze. He is the flâneur, the one who strolls along the streets searching for the city. Walter Benjamin evokes the flâneur that discovers the iron and steel arcades, those urban elements of passage in 19th century Paris. These objects determine the specificity of the Parisian flâneur. The flâneur, always a dilettante, an amateur, wanders around through the city searching for the shapes that make its particularities.
In Bucharest, the bricked up window seems a frequently seen sign of the specific relation between the public sphere and the private. In our stroll, the public space is interogated at the level of its visuality, questioning the gaze of the wandering subject. The visuality of the public space reaches a pause through the anti-window. The anti-window is a blocking of the curious gaze that seeks the dialogue of the public with the private space. In this way, the anti-window radicalizes difference between the two spaces. Although the private has isolated itself, traces of the dialogue are still visible: decolored squares following the former limits of the window, untouched windowsills, sometimes even frames or plate glasses with bricks built behind them. The visuality of the public space reinvents itself, it becomes something else, but still keeps scraps of another way of „seeing”.
What does the street become because of this change? Who is the flâneur of this street? Does the anti-window make him a potential danger? Either way, in front of the window that has become a wall, the flâneur becomes more present and more isolated.

museum slash Museum

http://www.vimeo.com/14827176

museum slash Museum
part of the Double Life project of Olga Kisseleva

video, 4’, 2010.


Soundtrack text:
My name is Veda Popovici. I am an artist. And I earn my living working as a teacher at secondary school.
I teach art practice and art history to 11, 12, 13 and 14 year olds. I could say that my job is to teach children how to express themselves. Which it is. But more importantly, my job is to make sure they understand and learn society’s established notions of art.
What is art? What is an artist? Who made art and why? What are the most important artists, movements of our culture? Well, it isn’t exactly our culture. It is just the culture.
I actually don’t know the answer to any of these questions. But the teacher must know and with this knowledge form young subjetivities.
I show them virtual reproductions of works of art that I like and that correspond to the style I must teach. I hope they will remember at least some of the works and build an imaginary, personal, however small museum. It will be a museum of replicas, wannabes, copies.
Not a strong but a fragile museum built to be eventually demolished. A fictional museum. But what kind of a museum could I expect them to built? Fake museums are the only ones they can experience in this society, the society they live in. Museums empty of reality, that have only wrapping. These institutions consist only of the reinforcement of their historical authority.
Tell me, dear, have you learned the lesson on Baroque? If its Baroque it means its with a 13 year old I’m talking. I couldn’t teach him pop art. History must be respected. History is here a progress, and it’s always Western, always masculine, always white.
Sitting obedient in their little desks with their paper, crayons and colors they wait for me to tell them what to do. How to make art. Madam, what should I draw today? Is it good, is it beautiful? Is it finished?
I am no Madam and I have no answers. Still, I must tell them something. Eventually I tell them the what and the how. Of course it’s beautiful. All that they do is just beautiful.
What I did lately was establishing the Blind Museum. The Blind Museum hasn’t got any works to show. More precisely its works are hidden, kept away from the eye of the viewer. They are wrapped, buried. The gaze that this museum forms is a blocked one. It is censored, blinded.
It is a museum of no masters and no masterpieces. It proposes no role models to admire or despise. The Blind Museum is in search for its tradition. History is too heavy. Too difficult to handle. So this museum just overlooks it.
The Blind Museum isn’t an alternative. It echoes an everpresent structure of power and authority. It is a sign of the burden of powerplayed history.
The museum has a catalogue. It provides information about its establishment, its artists and its objectives.
The blind museum celebrates no particular history and it designs no particular future. It is an inoperable instrument of modernity. It could announce a failure or a success.
It is neither good, nor evil.
It does not try to form subjectivities. It is just a testimony of an aged and dysfunctional story. And, thus, harmless.

Muzeul Orb/the Blind Museum

The Blind Museum, established in 2010, is an autonomous institution with the aim of negotiating the lacks in history based on the museum's authority. Claiming itself form the particularities of 20th century art system, BM doesn’t have any models to forward. It exists even though it doesn’t (yet) shelter or exhibit works of art. The museum is in search of both a premises and a gaze which to model.
The condition that launched the Museum is the lack of historical discourses of recent Romanian art. As a young artist that needs to reflect upon the history of his/hers society and needs to find within this history artists and works to which to react to, either critically or in admiration, the lack of coherent narratives of recent art history is reclaimed as an aberration. The Blind Museum is the context in which this situation is reflected upon.
Further on, the institution developed into reflections on the authoritative nature of the institution of the museum, the ideology of the white cube and the hegemony of masculine canon in Western art.
Recently, the museum has worked as a framework for identifying invisible mechanisms of power involving contemporary and historical conditions.
It remains an institution which elaborates on a formalism of dystopia and paradox.

The Blind Museum , first opening, Atelier 35, april 2010. Views of the installation below:

Muzeul Orb/the Blind Museum (NOTEXT)

NOTEXT, plexiglass support with black marker

Muzeul Orb/the Blind Museum (bandaged paintings)

Muzeul Orb/the Blind Museum (statement)

statement, transparent foil, 40 pieces.

the Blind Museum is closed.
It has nothing to offer, nothing to see. Here images are missing, they are hidden, postponed. The gaze does not fall, does not slide on anything but remains blocked, stopped.
It is non-gaze.
The works of art that the museum shelters do not seduce, do not offer meaning. They are still flounderings. Preserved, restored, archived for no one.
It could be the effect of
a history of aggressive shifting of meaning, of censorship and oppression.
It is the articulation of something that is in the back of the mind, behind the eyelashes.
The horizon that one can see is foggy. It is disorientation.
A tradition that does not offer anything produces offsprings emptied of identity.
An identity that can borrow from anywhere, can
fill itself with anything, it can be torn and then resumed.
the Blind Museum is in a fine balance of negation. It pendulates subtly, with whispers between promise-suspicion-hesitation-postponement.
It could give, it could take.
Visibility is censored here, what one can see is what an aborted sight can see,
a sight that does not reach far,
a suppressed sight.
the museum provokes the Museum. But it does so with whispered shouts. It weakens it
with whispers. MO is an inoperable instrument of Modernity.
It could be the announcement of a failure or of a success.
It is neither good, nor evil.
It does not try to form subjectivities, moralities or aesthetics. It is
a decayed patriarch, aged and crippled. And, thus, harmless.

Muzeul Orb/The Blind Museum (catalogue)

selection of 40 still images that form the catalogue.

the Catalogue, book/object, canvas, photo stills, hand sewn.

Hommage-movie of the former ParadisGaraj, now the Kunsthalle of Batistei, during the first artist residency of the facility accommodating Arnold Schlachter.

Silent nature

photography, 2010.

This piece dwells upon issues of femininity, autonomy of art and effects of art. Silent nature refers to a specific subjectivity, developed within these three directions and of which relation with the world can be resumed as harmlessness.