After resurrecting a sideline story from communist Romania and turning it into a lens through which to view ourselves, micro-narratives appear to be more relevant than ever.
A dismal picture of a paralyzed population gulping for riches and material accumulations, taking western ideals too lightly has emerged, particularly since the collapse of Ceausescu’s regime. If Ioana Maria Sisea‘s previous show “Harvest Time” at Kunsthalle Bega attempted to call attention to our past; her main interest at the time being family history, at London’s Rosenfeld Gallery solo show, Ioana seduces the audience with 36 little and medium-sized sculptures made of stoneware, glaze, and lustre. The sculptures represent sensuous interactions between half-naked women and bears who kiss, embrace, and exploit each other while holding their mouths wide like hungry fledgling birds waiting to be fed. These ardent activities portray extreme habits, which may be characterized as Romanians’ appetite for cockiness and mocking of resources. The artist’s sculptures are accompanied with Instagram video briefs, a user experience meant for historical reference that immerses the spectator in genuine events and experiences while masking satire and moral indignation.
Lache, a bear that weighed more than 400 kg and had been tamed at an Oradea zoo, is claimed to have been moved to the mountain resort of Brasov to be raised in captivity with the goal of being subsequently “hunted” by Romanian dictator Ceausescu to challenge Tito’s record-breaking performance. In Ioana’s telling of this story, the bear is converted into an omnipotent vehicle for symbolism, a scapegoat, a laughing prankster with his tongue constantly out, a symbol of chaos, and becomes an even more exploitative object both physically and figuratively. Ioana is not afraid to make overt references to corrupt and illegal political figures from recent Romanian history. In “Elena Udrea, Shaman Goddess of Romanian Politics,” the artist references the so called “blonde from Cotroceni” who emerges from the skin of a brown bear hailed by other women admirers stomping each other in adulation. A perplexed woman in high heels, half-naked, relaxes in a bathtub on the stretched-out skin of a bear in another piece from the same series. Later, she humps two bears and celebrates the bear with abandoned money.
Since the Paleolithic, the bear has been revered as a holy animal, guardian of the forest, and ruler of cosmic energies. It was seen by Romanians in the Carpathians as a symbol of power and virility; it was protected by some governments while despised by others; it was adored by children but detested by communities when bears forced-fully disturbed their peace by approaching homes drawn by food scraps left by careless humans. It was even immortalized in a sad story by Romanian novelist Cezar Petrescu in 1931. In the book “Fram Ursul Polar,” a circus white bear endures anguish and longs for his own Nordic lands. When he eventually arrives, he discovers that he cannot eat seals or other animals since they remind him of the seals at the circus. He eventually decides to return to the people to whom he belongs since he can no longer tolerate his natural world. In clever fashion Ioana’s re-activation of Lache, has similar receding quality. We are left with the impression of full power abdication and minimal nostalgia. The utter transformative vitality of Ioana’s recent body of work compelled us to speak with her on the occasion of her London solo show.
AM: Would you mind describing your work after studying graphic arts at the Bucharest University of Arts and afterwards experimenting with ceramics, film, and installation? I’m aware that scenography classes were also a component of your curriculum. When beginning a new project, how do you normally get started?
IS: After I left the Art University in Bucharest, I took some time to experiment. I became more proficient in what I could make with certain mediums, and so naturally those appeared more often in my practice. I was never afraid to start learning from zero like I did with ceramics, but it took me 8 years to have a mature show of ceramic works.
Any medium is important for me in the capacity it has to help me express movement, emotion, humor, etc. But it is never a purpose in itself. I don’t think of myself as a ceramicist, painter, or filmmaker; I just sculpt with whatever is on hand—color, clay, image.
I have a lot of themes circulating in my mind at all times. These get triggered by one image, a story, or other fragments of reality. Some of these themes grow and grow until they have enough layers to provide a world for me to explore. At that point, I began to transform them into physical works.
It’s essential that the subject matter has inner coherence and complexity because I don’t plan everything that I will make in advance. I rely on the depth of the subject matter to create meaning between the individual works that I produce. Only after completing a certain number of works do I think about how I want them to fit together when I show them.
AM: I’ve been trying to put my finger on why I find your work so useful in defining what it means to be Romanian as well as discovering about our past. What can you tell us about the deep respect for family history and individual mythology that seems to permeate your creative output?
IS: I am genuinely interested in Romania and what it feels like to live here now. I love it, and I am fascinated by the irony of how it tries to portray itself as a land of bucolic peasantry, but around me all people want to do is buy luxury goods and party.
I focus on the empirical rather than the analytical, looking at what people do and trying to capture vignettes from actual scenes that I have witnessed either firsthand or in the media. I suppose that underpinning my work is a fascination with “liberty,” which has its own nuances in a Romanian context. As you saw in the Instagram posts that reference my sculptures, I have videos of the revolutionary crowd demanding liberty from Communism, and then 30 years later, a promo for the 1st of May seaside celebration where women dancing and climbing out of Bugattis is deliberately referenced by the newscaster as “liberty”. There was a long period in which Romanian people fundamentally lacked freedom over their bodies, hopes, dreams, material existences, and collective destiny. We are still experimenting with what it means to have that freedom.
My family history is relevant for my work due to them always being witnesses rather than protagonists to the events of Romanian history. Both my grandparents and parents tried to get by as discretely as possible, just making ends meet. That created in me a fascination for watching other people but also an understanding that agency was totally different under Communism, when so much of life was prescribed by the state.
AM: Is there anything you can tell us about the inspiration for this show’s overarching themes? The consequences of women’s bodies being de-personalized by the communist dictatorship and contemporary feminist perspectives appear to have had a significant impact on your outlook.
IS: Researching the hunting trips of Ceausescu and seeing the images and videos of the dead bears lined up on the grass—one in particular had a cigarette stuck in its nose—I had a strong sensation of the disposability of bodies. Whether it be the bears shot by Ceausescu, the protestors killed in the revolution, trafficked children, or the women selling themselves today (60% of the prostitutes in Europe are Romanian), there always seem to be nameless bodies piling up as a by-product of society. The competition to not be one of those bodies is a central theme of the show. For women, the use of their sexuality to achieve economic emancipation is a dance with the devil, but many take the chance due to the rewards being otherwise unattainable.
Romania has a particularly strong relationship with exploitation of the body, from Ceausescu’s prohibition on contraception to the sale of male, female, and child bodies after Communism, as one of the only currencies left in a period of massive poverty and unemployment. In a capitalist world that is highly exploitative of physical labor, the sale of the body can be a relative high-income activity offering economic status that would otherwise be impossible. Some of the lowest-income, low-skilled jobs in Romania are webcam work, for example, and sex work is arguably one of the only jobs where the promise of capitalism to gain a better lifestyle than that of your parents still remains.
The stigma attached to sex work is very arbitrary. Prostitution is frowned upon, but finding a rich husband is admired, yet the difference between them is arguably just the number of clients. In the Lache show, there are a number of women (the strippers, the bear shaman, the women riding the bears, the woman in the bathtub, the gambler) who have achieved emancipation from men and from poverty through the sale of their bodies in some way. I want to celebrate these women unreservedly.
AM: What would you say makes your process unique? The way I see it, you’re an artist who finds permanency amusing, and you get at your ‘clean’ forms through transmuting various materials. While imprinted soap—a menacing but also delicate form—was one of your chosen materials in past work, an emphasis on a play on facts and myths seems to pervade your ceramic vignettes in the Rosenfeld Gallery show.
IS: The amusement you mention comes from the dichotomy between who we really are and who we like to think we are. That is the interplay between reality and myth. Myth is underpinned by the idea of eternity, whereas reality is inherently transient. I source the scenes I depict from reality so that they are irrefutable, despite the reflex people have to deny them. With my soap pieces, I collected statements that people had made to me in the past and imprinted them. Often, people would try to deny they had said those words, as it contradicted their internal mythos.
Myth is a narrative construction that is very factually selective. I think it can be highly oppressive because the behaviors that it idealizes are often socio-economically exclusive. Many people don’t have the liberty of a clean morality if they want to participate in the opportunities of capitalism. Like Elena Udrea. We expect women to be successful but not to use their sexuality, which is one of their strongest tools of influence. We celebrate people who are rich but disapprove when they get caught stealing. If they don’t get caught, we allow them to mythologize themselves as titans. Ironically, the fastest way for the proletariat to ascend to the social status of the elite is via criminality or exploitation, yet that, the alchemy of capitalism, demands to remain unspoken.
Exhibition review: Harvest Time at the Kunsthalle Bega in Timisoara As we imagine it, we will build it, as we shape it, it will mould us, if we trust it, it will work.
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.
AM: Tell us about your process for creating sculpture and the factors that go into deciding which materials to use. The Italian sculptor Adolfo Wildt from the nineteenth century thought of his work as a conversation with materiality. Was his attitude toward his duty to care for the unique characteristics of one material, marble, romantic or far ahead of its time? I’m curious as to how the radical soap works and the installation named “Harvest Time,” a deconstruction of your grandparents’ house into beads of glass, textiles, wood, and other materials, hanging from the ceiling of Kunsthalle Bega have affected your perspective on this.
IS: I love materials, and my didactic education in Romania influenced a lot of how I use them. In the making process, touch is an essential part for me. I am a romantic like Adolfo Wilde in the sense that I can’t author a work without touching it. I enjoy the process of making as much as seeing the result. Of course, this process is very different for each series; Harvest Time was transforming material into new shapes; my ceramic work is forming the material into shapes; and in my drawings, I think about sculpting with color. I don’t mind the indulgence of working with materials in a more abstract way, but I prefer to instrumentalize them for my portraiture. I like making work that is easy for the public to understand and connect with.
AM: Those women and bears portrayed in your current series of ceramics who engage drinking, dancing and partying never seek isolation, maybe because they see danger there. That was made very evident by communism, which vilified anybody who disagreed with official government rhetoric. A lot of drinking was involved in saying what was on your mind. Fill me as you see fit.
IS: That’s an interesting observation. The figures do not seek isolation, that is true. They are always seeking each other’s company. In general, they are obsessed with the present moment rather than contemplating another reality. In the world of Lache, I don’t consider isolation dangerous so much as irrelevant due to a lack of clarity about what it will bring. The bears and women are highly socialized because they are on a direct quest to seize whatever they can see in front of them.
“Party like there’s no tomorrow!” For me, that’s the significance of the flag with the hole—the inability to perceive a collective future. When people steal or party, they do the same thing: they don’t think of tomorrow. I think subconsciously, that underpins a lot of Romanian corruption. What difference is there if Elena Udrea, Calin Tariceanu, or Adrian Videanu steal? There is no unified national goal that we would allocate the money towards anyway.
AM: I’ve seen a focus on historical stories and unique knowledge, such as remarks on the false Romanian revolution of 1989 or the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu’s fondness for hunting. You may insert a statement from extreme far-right politician and former Romanian President Ion Iliescu (https://ioanasisea.com/The-Adventures-of-Bear-Lache-and-his-Friends) into the same paragraph. Explain how you expect such references to contribute to this body of work.
IS: I use quotes empirically, the same way I use images. They are all fragments of reality. The hagiography or demonization of certain figures and their words is part of the myth-making you reference above. As long as I think the person believed the words they said, I am interested in them, regardless of how I think of them morally, politically, or ethically. Only deliberately false statements are less interesting for me.
I like to think of the works as declarative statements. I imagine writing a sentence like, “There was a female politician called Elena Udrea who was sexy, glamorous, and c orrupt, adored by many, convicted as a criminal, and who managed to succeed as a woman in a male-dominated world.’ Since the truth value of those words is difficult to refute, it creates a context where people have to explore what it means that such a person existed in our reality.
AM: You have travelled quite a bit and have resided in both London and Berlin. The growing appreciation for native connections to home and the indigenous of artists is reassuring. For you, how do you think this devotion feeds into the contemporary art scene?
IS: I try to talk only about subjects I have experienced firsthand or that altered my reality through the impact they had on me. This could be an incidental topic like Lache that holds a lot of metaphorical power or an incessantly marketed topic like celebrity. Living in Romania, a lot of these subjects come through the local media, social media, and my immediate and visible reality. I would say I have a devotion to realism rather than my origin.
AM: Tell us about your future goals and where we may expect to see your work in the near future.
IS: My ongoing goal is to portray aspects of human nature like personal liberty, pleasure, irony, and exploitation. I am particularly interested in the body as an economic agent and how class informs cultural differences in how the body is used in society. I want to continue my portraiture with an open approach to using different media.
I have a plan for an installation piece based on a high-octane Romanian nightclub since the clubs in Bucharest are rivaled only by the superclubs in Vegas or Ibiza. So maybe I’ll see you in the club…
The Adventures of Bear Lache and his Friends
Ioana Maria Sisea
14 April – 19 May 2023
gallery rosenfeld
Ioana Maria Sisea works at the borderline between various mediums of artistic expression – ceramics, drawing, installation, sculpture or video – pursuing the perpetual change of position between sign and discourse, by complicating the relationship of the audience with the subject of the gaze. Combining studio work with a rigorous process of conceptualization, Ioana Sisea focuses on the realization of complex series of works whose production usually spans over several years.
In 2022, Sisea graduated from the MA program at the Royal College of Art in London and was awarded a PhD at the University of Art and Design in Cluj- Napoca. Her projects have been presented in solo and group exhibitions at the Museum of Art, Cluj-Napoca; Royal College of Art, London; MAGMA Contemporary Art Space, Sf. Gheorghe, Romania; Zina Gallery, Cluj-Napoca and Diehl Gallery, Berlin. Sisea’s works are a part of the National Museum of Art in Catalunya (MNAC) numerous private collections.
