STUDIES FOR A BURNING SILENCE
Dates | 24 September – 24 October 2022
Opening | Saturday, 24 September, 18:00
Location | Hangar F, 12 Atelierului Street, Alba Iulia 510001, Romania
Curator | Ada Muntean
Artists | Răzvan Neagoe / Dragoș Neagoe / Ada Muntean, Mathias Bar / Ana Maria Micu (collaborative project with Alexandra and Radu Constantinescu) / Mircea Modreanu
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One of the most iconic plays of the XX-th century, Waiting for Godot written by Samuel Becket in 1953 (the title paraphrasing the term „waiting for God” from the existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger) develops into several scenes with no narrative connection between them, the red thread binding them being a meaningless existence and absurd situations, with a gloomy character.[1] Waiting for Godot happens every day, taking the forms of an isolated waiting in the last few years, or problematic global crises with no real foreseeable solutions. The group project Studies for a Burning Silence analyses the relations between close/far, inside/outside, individual/collective, silence/noise that generate the coordinates of a universe we thought we knew.
Referencing the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre through the perspective of William Fleming: „[…] existence precedes essence. Firstly, man must exist to project his image, define himself and create his portrait through actions and works of art. Man is doomed to be free and the only border to his existence is existence itself. […] For Sartre death is the final absurdity. He would have agreed with Leonardo da Vinci, who says that precisely at the time when he was learning to live, he was in fact learning to die. Paradoxically, we cannot know life until we have faced death, we cannot seize assertion until we meet denial. All that lives – man or other creature – is under a permanent death sentence.”[2]
Faced with his own fate in an apparently godless world, man develops a specific form of knowledge, based on rationality, science, concrete facts and results. It relies on matter as the only visible, concrete certainty. Phenomenology shows through scientific discoveries that the solar system appeared as a secondary product to cosmic explosions in the Universe. Thus, our world, according to science, seems to have come to life due to chaos: the biochemist Jacques Monod, Nobel prize winner states in his work Chance and Necessity (1970) that cellular reproduction and metabolism appeared out of a random combination of certain proteins and nucleic acids. This means that man lives in an environment which is indifferent to his wishes, his hopes and his needs, alone in a neutral multiverse.[3]
Surrounded by this neutral environment, man tries to give meaning to the new existence spread in front of him, with a new perspective on the world he wishes in fact to dominate. Confronted with the primordial chaos and an infinity of options, he finds pertinent ways of expression through art in order to fight nothingness by transforming it into directed chaos.
In Studies for a Burning Silence, the sources of inspiration come from life, as elements of the ordinary recontextualised in a contemporary, interdisciplinary way where man plays a central role. Contemporary art suggests a conscious positioning of the artist as on a quest to reimagine the world from the inside and offers a critical commentary of both the intimate human consciousness, and the outside world where people live. The body becomes an intermediary between human consciousness and the world, through an extremely personal process that can be likened to breaking a mirror and then impossibly trying to put it back together.
[1] FLEMING, William. Arte și idei, Editura Meridiane, Vol. II, 1983, p.388
[2] Idem, p.389
[3] FLEMING, William. Arte și idei, Editura Meridiane, Vol. II, 1983, p.389
text by Ada Muntean
download pdf with text in Romanian
Group exhibition: Design Object
Date: 06 May – 06 June 2022
Venue: Galateea Contemporary Art Gallery, 132 Calea Victoriei, Bucharest, RO
The exhibition is part of DESIGN GO 2022, Romanian Design Week.
NAG: Noaptea Albă a Galeriilor/ White Night of the Art Galleries
Alexandra Constantinescu / Open Studio
Date: 15, 16, 17 October 2021
Studio adress: No.19, Gării Street, Cluj-Napoca
The studio, located close to the train station, is a 10-minutes walk from the city’s center. The space was conceived for solitary artistic practice and teaching ceramics classes and workshops. It is a place where the artist explores and expands her interest in art and design, a laboratory that supports unpredictable collides between ideas, materials, and techniques. Always in a state of flux, it showcases works at different stages of concept and production, highlighting key moments of contemplation, when the expected results can be reconsidered. Samples of by-products are kept to inform on additional routes that could lead to new thinking patterns and practical means to reach the completion of an idea.
Alexandra Constantinescu welcomes visitors to explore her practice. Continuously researching throughout an area that stems further from her main discipline, that of sculpture, Alexandra approaches art and design by employing additional mediums such as ceramics, installation, and computer-generated animation. Into her technical endeavors, she pours transitory perceptions, experiences, emotions, memories, images, words, objects, and materials collected from everyday life. The studio is an archive of processes, put on display to encourage spontaneous discussions on art-making and, in general, pursuits we all follow in the name of empathy.
Artistic collaboration
Date | 15 June – 14 July 2021
Venue | Mind Set Art Center: 7F, No.180, Sec. 1, Heping E. Rd., Da’an Dist., Taipei City 106, Taiwan
Together with Radu Constantinescu, we contributed to Ana Maria Micu’s experimental short animated video “Acqua Alta”. The collaborative work is to be exhibited in Micu’ solo show “Objects Must Be Comfortable”.
Micu’s animation concept is about a method to document progress during drawing sessions but spreads into illustrating acts of care, protective actions, and spontaneous fantastical narratives. Her initial idea was about a hand hovering over a wrinkled fabric, touching it, in an attempt to flatten, maybe caress, or examine it.
Our response was inspired by observing a neighbor’s garden, where indoor furniture was being repurposed for outdoor use. As protection against the elements, a table was covered with a piece of plastic, held in place with rocks, so the wind would not blow it away. We documented this real-life situation and introduced it as 2 fragments of 3D animation, among Micu’s scenes.
Excerpt from “Acqua Alta”
animation | 6m2s | no audio | 2021
Ana Maria Micu – concept, digital drawing, clay animation, and editing
Alexandra Constantinescu, Radu Constantinescu – concept, 3D animation