Is it possible to have partial freedom? Do we find ourselves adopting a tainted form of liberty, an intimate liberty? What does it mean to be human—to be male or female? “To be a man,” Sartre and Gombrowicz agreed, “is to pretend to be a man.” (1)
It is possible to speak about a man’s independence when he cannot be reduced to his status, position, community, nation, race, or genealogy. This is the reason why there is something unattractive about having complete freedom.
What I found appealing about the presentation of works at the Kunsthalle Bega is something I strive towards in my own work as an artist. The conviction that artistic representation cannot be unethical or devoid of responsibility. Therefore, I contend, nothing in the world of art, or anything created as art, should be separated from a feeling of reality. We’ve come to feel that art is more of a fiction, that everything goes, and that our representations and metaphors should only be taken seriously in the context of imagination and fantasy. It is necessary to mention at this point that each artistic output contains the action of interpretation at its core. It operates within the parameters of interpretation, which is a matter of presence, and so of knowing. Because our circumstances change, how we experience the same artistic work is always different. Since the late nineteenth century, there has been a growing interest in the inner life of the artist. A “what does this make me feel like, what does this remind me of in my own life” approach was created in acting with Stanislavsky and in visual arts, first with the impressionist movement backed by Freudian research in human physiology. From the novel to the painting, all kinds of art have gotten considerably more personal since the nineteenth century. … moving away from external conditions and in on the individual’s personality, goals, and dreams, discovering the inner of the individual as the source of truth that needed to be liberated. We are now at a place where freedom is meant to come from inside, but we are faking it in the process, confusing interpretation with reality, biology with cultural constructs. Being tired has never been so pervasive in our day, and science-based common sense has never been more strained. I went to see Various Degrees of Freedom with mixed feelings, wanting to be challenged, and I must admit that there are conflicts within it that allow for more discussion.
The following are excerpts from the exhibition curated by Diana Marincu, the creative director of Art Encounters Foundation and arguably the most distinguished curator of her age.
A two-part display. Cristian Rusu’s deconstruction of Kunsthalle Bega building in a mammoth piece called Ghost Geometry, which stood alone for more than two months as an in-situ installation, was subsequently joined in the second half of the project by additional works by curator-selected artists. I wouldn’t say Cristian Rusu’s work began as a piece of art and then evolved into the exhibition’s architecture/design. Artists’ friends employ this stereotype. Rusu’s work is too tenacious, too present, and too fascinating to be anything else than a work of art. It is so dominant that the tensions formed by the weights and proportions of the components have an overpowering uncensored feel to them. The play on illusion and reality, between steady state and dynamic, false and real, delights us in re-thinking the existent beams of the space naturalizing architectural features that otherwise technically remain fixed and autocratic.
Cristian Rusu writes:
“My dialogue with the space is a polemical one, in which, starting from the morphology of the exhibition space, I try to destabilize the given architectural order, through volumetric interventions. From the very beginning, I perceived the Kunsthalle Bega space as extremely visually challenging: a complicated space because of its structure (size, architectural structures, geometry). That’s why I decided to overbid this psycho-somatic pressure to maximum saturation. Through this installation, I also continue my research on the approach to the sublime (beauty, fascination and fear) in a contemporary context, as well as my melancholic gaze towards the admiration of the ruin that I see as an engine of my artistic meditation. The installation is a personal intervention in the Kunsthalle Bega, as well as a space reshaped for the upcoming exhibition Different Degrees of Freedom.’ (Cristian Rusu, 2022).”
While entering Kunsthalle Bega, a white linen fabric undone in its form bears the traces of the Ukrainian conflict. Anna Zvyagintseva is a Kyiv-based artist who utilizes thin white draperies to depict strategies to remain alive or hastily take notes during an invasion.
Sebastian Moldovan is becoming more casual in his sets. His piece, “Hoarding Freedoms,” is another “untidy” manifestation of the conflict between inside and outside. Piles of rubble, books, and even a small pond coexist within the confounds of broken fake walls propped precariously as if in a hurry; a cave with an opening where, if you’re brave enough, you could climb a stair that leads to what is an observational point, a clear sign of the uncertainty that emanates from this arrangement. A ramp made of found wood plates and boards, reminiscent of an urban skateboard ramp, allows visitors to slide. Its shape is spectacular, but its function is unknown. What is clear is that walking through his ‘environment’ is like witnessing a frozen shipwreck. Perhaps even a mental state.
“Fragile” was Ștefania Becheanu’s opening act. She expanded her artistic language while experimenting with sound and installation at the École Superieure de Lorraine (ARS) in Metz, France, after graduating from the Timisoara Art School. Her live act, which involves putting objects and sensors into classical instruments and relishing their possibilities, resembles the late 1960s New York avant-garde. At the outset, Ștefania “played” the strings of an electric guitar, which were tied to multicolored cloth strings that generated musical noises when pinched or touched. It will be intriguing to observe how her live shows, which currently involve technological trickery and a playful body, evolve.
Ciprian Muresan’s Auto-Da-Fé was first displayed at Art Basel Statements in 2008. It is made up of photographs of texts in urban settings that were inspired by passages from Elias Canetti’s novel — an extensive monologue of the character Peter Kien, overwhelmed by his utopian projections but also by the fascination of rhetoric. The presence of these incomplete quotes, drawn with spray paint or markers by friends of his in Cluj and Viena, makes a comment on the act that artists make, which is to leave marks, and also hints at states of being or calls to action. In the safety of the gallery, we are confronted with the derelict, illegal, and anonymous tweets of a world like a blank page.
Andreea Albani’s wall sculpture Cut the Line (Time #0.6), which shows laser-cut woodwork, shows how time and writing seem to be at odds with each other. It’s fascinating how she manages to demonstrate that any system of notation fails to capture an occurrence in some way, hinting at our existential constraints. Works by internationally known artist Mircea Cantor, who is contributing three works to the show, are shown in the same room as Albani’s wall sculptures. Holy Flowers, for example, is made up of 12 pictures that show a kaleidoscope of weapons made to look like flowers. His smart, amusing simplicity, which can be found in many of his works, is at work here. He is adept at dealing with binary, “stitching” two significant objects, in this example the flower and the rifle, without getting too lost in the shades. A film in loop, hung on one of the space’s massive beams, depicts a kid lying on his back in a grassy field, showing mild unease at being filmed, and asking, “Am I really free?” The insert video, shot during the COVID epidemic, works as a jingle all through the show but loses its force after numerous loops, fading in the background like a scrolled-up post.
Sonic Shadows, a sound installation by Andrei Bucovanu, is made out of a big, DIY wooden odd structure with speakers that have strands of rope attached to each of the speakers; the ropes are electronically vibrating and may be touched.
Multidisciplinary artist born in Paris, Marie-Claire Messouma Manlanbien’s work is influenced by various cultures, and she attempts to establish encounters between components of other civilizations and unify them via syncretism. She studies the complicated links between everyday life, global popular culture, and unique traditional traditions. She is motivated by its French and Guadeloupian Creole cultures and Côte d’Ivoire’s matriarchal institution’s value-weighing artifacts. Having her own separate room, a well-thought-out decision on the part of the curator, she mixes sculpture, embroidery, and weaving with attachments of small totemic ceramic heads, horse hair, and even strands of human hair in a decorative manner that resembles plans of villages, cartographies of intimacy, colonial histories, and plural identities.
Sinta Werner’s installation “Linear Uncertainties” symbolically represents principles of regulation in public space while Austrian artist Judith Fegerl’s sculptures Batch, and Unbraided made up of welded thin metal bars held together by paper tape, hints to what Diana Marincu pointed at the opening, that is a play on the institutional critique of the omnipresent politics of the straight white walls of the exhibition spaces.
Adrian Ganea and Stefan Curelici also gave us representations of the effects humans have on the urban development, in beautiful renditions in video (Ganea) and in painting (Curelici) of the thin boundary between nature and culture questioning the status of the Anthropocene.
The exhibition titled ‘Different Degrees of Freedom’ is on view until 2nd of July 2023
Curator: Diana Marincu
Artists: Andreea Albani (RO), Ștefania Becheanu (FR/RO), Andrei Bucovanu (RO), Mircea Cantor (FR/RO), Ștefan Curelici (RO), Judith Fegerl (AT), Adrian Ganea (RO), Marie-Claire Messouma Manlanbien (FR), Sebastian Moldovan (RO), Ciprian Mureșan (RO), Cristian Rusu (RO), Sinta Werner (DE), Anna Zvyagintseva (UA).
1 – Witold Gombrowicz, Diary, vol. 2 (1957-61), trans. Lillian Vallee (Evan- ston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1989), p. 5.
2 – Paul Neagu and Monica Omescu in the catalogue of the Paul Neagu. Drawing-Engraving-Sculpture exhibition, edited by Paul Neagu and Ruxandra Balaci with Marica Grigorescu and Horea Avram. Romanian National Museum of Art, Department of Contemporary Art, 1996, p.11
3 – Paul Neagu in Hyphen (1975-1985) A Sculpture by Paul Neagu, Visual Heremeneutics, London 1985, p.51
