It is difficult to be impressed by Ioana Maria Sisea’s Harvest Time installation. Even though the work she is presenting at Kunsthalle Bega, Timisoara, has the ingredients to get under your skin, mainly through the emotional reference Ioana makes to her grandparents’ house, after their death, the work not only is resistant to easy takes on memory and nostalgia, but it is frighteningly clever in disarming the viewer, forcing them with an ‘after the fact’ all at once, unapologetic proof of a functional organism. Therefore, I was not impressed, as I said, because to be impressed is to have a specific expectation, which says more about oneself than the artwork I was rather made aware of its capacity to shift a paradigm, which is much more exciting.
The ‘Harvest Time’ is a large-scale installation presented in Bega Box at Kunsthalle Bega, an experimental space in western Romania’s Timisoara, which will soon begin its program as European Capital of Culture. The starting point of the installation is the transformation of Ioana’s grandparents’ house, more specifically, its insides through cutting, drilling, melting and re-melting; stacking, bits of furniture, curtains, windows, etc., through a process of ‘beedification’, ‘padification’ on strings of metal wire.
Born in 1988, Ioana Maria Sisea managed to bypass what so many Romanian artists have not, in the last twenty years; working on the ‘surface’, engaging in delightful tactility, in order to move us. No. She does what Lindsay Anderson did with ‘If….’. He didn’t want the film to be a tract: “I would hope that it’s an experience, not an illustration.”
We have no students on the roof of a school machine gunning their teachers/the establishment so well directed by Anderson in ‘If….’ in an attempt to get rid of rigid ideology. We have in Ioana’s installation, ‘Harvest Time’, a successful expression of the difficulty of ‘’taking something into the future,’’ as Ioana put it, so efficient and tactical (even though these are industrial design notions) in transforming the individual character of a house, maybe even a national mentality.
In this particular work, Ioana Maria Sisea masters a homeland art. She’s not the only Romanian living artist to cater to something of the Romanian tradition, but she does so not through adornment, and idealisation like the Romanian born artist Mircea Cantor or painter Stefan Caltia, but through violence. She is very particular in how this destruction takes place, to the point that, of course, the destruction is considered an act of salvation. How to do this? In painting, scrupulously photographing the house, taking a mould of this dear house? Obviously not. Not her approach. It’s enough to have in mind her performance and video “Licking a Rolls Royce in its entirety’, to understand what I am talking about. Her entire discourse is dependent on giving her audience a chance to experience sensations of altered states of objects or social activities that otherwise would be just the same. Finally, I don’t have the feeling, and this is so liberating, of shooting at the target with art made of a monk’s wax, as the Romanian poet Angela Marinescu pointed out.
Losing one grandparent is enough of a trauma for most of us. What to make of it is another thing. Leave it hanging in one’s heart or transform it into something which makes sense to others, that’s what we’re witnessing. Because by hanging all these deconstructed elements on strings, chaos is rendered invisible; a drawer, a couch, a curtain, robes, unrecognisable, cut off from being remembered and visualised as they were when they were made or worn, cut off from toxic narratives, unreliable, distracted. That is why we have to learn from Ioana’s work. That’s why this work is monumental — because it does not talk about a personal trauma but a national trauma. It does not talk about the difficulty of losing somebody, but teaches us how to live with trauma, how to transform it so we can move on. Where are the works of art that allow for a spiritual silence that transcends hard reality, or that distil violence to put us at ease and protect us from chaos and bastardization? Spend time with the work of Ioana and you’ll see that it gets under the skin if processed as an indication that we are desperately in need of dropping a big part of who we are, maybe even drop it forever.
Alex Mirutziu in conversation with artist Ioana Maria Sisea from Alex Mirutziu on Vimeo.
Harvest Time
02.09 – 16.10.2022
Kunsthalle Bega, Timisoara
Artist: Ioana Maria Sisea
Curators: Anca Verona Mihuleț, Iris Ordean
Alex Mirutziu in conversation with curator Iris Ordean from Alex Mirutziu on Vimeo.
