MNAC Bucharest

AURELIA MIHAI THE SOCIAL BEING OF TRUTH

03.06 - 30.08. 2009

How do we perceive the distance between the truth in documentary film and the documentary value of any filmic production?

How do we, as spectators, apprehend the confrontation between the space of the documentary and that of fiction?

Does objectivity completely disappear when the fantastical comes into play?

Where do we dig out for the constructed realities?

Has the documentary as a genre come to speak about a fragmentary and unstable ground that is private and subjective, about remembrance and impression, about devotedness and ideology?

Does it even matter if the event has or has not taken place, since the politics of representation and interpretation is what actually carries the weight?

THE SOCIAL BEING OF TRUTH presents seven video works made by Aurelia Mihai between 2002 and 2008.

They are part of a consistent portfolio that - with two exceptions - has not been shown in Romania until now.

The selection seeks to illuminate the mechanisms and strategies employed by Aurelia Mihai in her work:

… from the investigation of the private space to that of the social disparities and anachronisms (This is the Hour, 2002 and From Time to Time, 2003)…

… from the fixed camera recording the discontinuities in daily life (The Day. It Begins with the Cock and Ends with the Dogs, 2005)…

… to the ambivalent moves of the dervish dance (In the Open Air, 2007);

… from the aesthetic of the pseudo-documentary Valley of Dreamers (2004) - in which what is discovered are not the treasures of the ancient but the Las Vegas egyptomania and the movie props of Cecil B. DeMille’s Ten Commandments from 1923…

… to the warm and empathic perspective adopted in …and the Moldavian one (2008). The video tells the story of destinies separated by the river Prut and the history and thus comments on laws, habits and transactions, which are deemed relevant to the understanding of the relation between art and society.

GILI MOCANU EACH OF THE TWO MOMENTS

31.03 - 27.06. 2010

The current provocation focused to a greater extent on the elasticity and the accuracy of a self-reflexive and prospective approach, which is capable of solving (at least on an individual basis) the equation of the two instances of art: the studio and the museum, together with the art’s conditions:

… gesture and circumstances, research and demonstrations, occurrence and finality, project and exhibition…

The series of paintings displayed for the show are relevant for the artist’s interest of dissecting and controlling the pictorial space.

After a prolonged training within the figurative register, as a constant perception of the body, the artist seems to test our tolerance to abstraction, and at the same time its persuasiveness.

In Each of the Two Moments, Gili Mocanu is engaged beyond the space of painting, taking it as a model.

On the one hand, the present intervention is equivalent to some ready-mades: the two elements do not come forth from nothing, because they are inferred from his own painting and are treated as “objective experiences”.

On the other hand, discussing about terms like faktura and tektonica, these interventions are meant to place us face to face with a “real” situation, besides the illusion and the conventions conveyed by the image.

This experiment renders the argument of a theoretician like Beatriz Colomina, for whom the “perception of the space is not what the space is, but is one of its manifestations; in this respect, the created space has an equal authority as that of the drawing, the photo and of its representation”.

Gili Mocanu’s current style, which was set forth in the Papal Square (2007), a work that is part of the MNAC collection and that is presented in the exhibition, deals with a frozen three-dimensionality, whose frontal perception recommend itself as an image.