In a system where the source and authenticity of information are constantly under question, where the facts that define one’s existence are fragile, the individual’s tendency is to search for personal safe places or redemptive perspectives. In Mircea Nedelciu’s novel, from where the exhibition bears its name, a fabulation treatment is a mean of inducing in the individual existence the feeling that his repressed subliminal background can rebirth in conditions caused by himself. This is not seen as an escapist utopia, but as active intervention, a will of the individual to face external deterministic factors. For Nedelciu this proposed system represents a practice of sanity that could function in a totalitarian state.
Nowadays, the constant flux of bad news and headlines of terror recalls a new urge for intimacy and security. Courtesy of the Internet, we experience a new and strange state of the world in which all areas seem to exist at once. In cultural terms, this fact could be interpreted as a sign that we have reached a mannerist stage or a state of total exhaustion that makes any further historical action impossible. In terms of information spreading the side effect of this uncontrolled environment of data, is represented by the fake news phenomenon and the post-truth discourse that shape our current political realities. But this is just the tip of the iceberg, beside the obvious, manipulative tactics are used with the help of technologically advanced tools for more subliminal approaches. It is argued that 3% of all the images from social media are steganographic messages used as an advanced tool of sending encrypted strategic messages by informal groups of opinion. If not repressed by a political authority we could argue that the individual face the same insecurity in this totally uncontrolled medium.
Fabulation Treatment is designed as a useful object, a tripartite tool for our guidance in finding personal safe spaces for an ever increasing and demanding socially interconnected system. Outside the gallery, Radu Nastasia staged an evocative monument that depicts ones popular underground means of escape, a large flag with the palindrome of a drug, encapsulated in a bleach plaque inscribed with a pop quatrain that functions like an incantation. Inside the gallery a paradoxical avenue of consumerist advertising landscape, mixed with vernacular urbanite architecture depicted in expressionistic manner are representing the depopulated crowded areas from Bucharest in incognito canvases which Mircea Ciutu crafted and designed them to resemble large advertising displays. More than getting into ta state of mind just aside of reality by escapist means, or meditating at the current reality with its ever altered symbolism, the intervention can decisively transform the real into a post-capitalist aesthetic arena. Filled with retro arcana and in-jokes, the painting installations of Christian Roncea suppress the symbol of authority, the policemen, by reducing him to a prominently CCTV dummy camera. Or, in an environment in which artists could borrow from any period of art to produce paintings, the eternal St. George fighting the evil becomes impersonated in a bitter Tweety that resembles an anxious angel of history.
Venue:
Dierenriem 42, 7071TH, Ulft, Netherlands