with Janek Simon
2008
installations, mixed media
"Vlad Nancă (Bucharest) and Janek Simon (Krakow) first met in 2004 during a residency at Casino Luxemburg, Luxembourg. Janek later exhibited in Bucharest (2020 Home Gallery) at Vlad's invitation, and then invited Vlad to participate in the Polish Year in Madagascar project (2006). This growing acquaintance and friendship between the artists, who also share similar generational and geopolitical experiences, provided a starting point for their joint-project in Raster.
The exhibition takes the shape of a creative experiment, a peculiar way of doubling one's artistic capacity - the artists alter and remake each other's works by changing the context, "improving" them, or simply translating them into their own artistic language. The result is a series of works of somewhat ambiguous authorship: Vlad's works are a variation on chosen early projects by Janek, and conversely Janek has chosen to rework particular pieces of Vlad's. This seemingly simple idea, however, reveals a number of interesting issues. On the one hand it asks questions about the possibility of "improving" someone else's work and a clash of two artistic egos. On the other hand, the process of remixing specifically boils down to changing the context of the original works, thus becoming a process of cultural translation which is particularly intriguing.
What determines the difference in thinking between two young artists active at the beginning of the 21st century in two European countries with similar recent history and geopolitical and institutional conditionings? Would the works of a Romanian artist, once filtered through the sensitivity of his Polish counterpart, become more legible to us, and vice versa? And finally, how far can one go in relieving a work from its original meaning, and how capable is it of acquiring new meanings?
This exhibition hints at various possible answers to the above questions and a number of ways of providing them. By choosing and reworking each other's pieces Nancă and Simon have managed to create a whole which indicates similarities in both their artistic practice and field of interest. Thus the exhibition in Raster can also be seen as a reflection of the Do-It-Yourself strategies and personal involvement in anarchist or alterglobalist movements. Particular works, such as personal armor for urban combat invented by Vlad and "improved" by Janek, or Janek's "Suicide-painter" "altered" by Vlad into a home-made painterly battle, reach back to practices verging on guerilla warfare. In the context of the Raster exhibition those references take on an even more complex character. They refer to the topicality of straightforward engagement and the issues of institutionalization and "musealization" of such practices, advanced chiefly by means of contemporary art."
Lukasz Gorczyca
[More images and the list of works here.]
Remix exhibition
Labels:
2008,
installation
I love shopping!
2007
b&w photographs
dimensions variable
"In Vlad Nanca’s work, I love shopping!, different temporalities and realities are being conflated. The long hours of queuing up in front of supply stores represented a harsh aspect of daily life during the socialist era. By presenting two small black and white photographs that show him entering and getting out of a supermarket, the artist confronts yesterday’s food shortage with today’s ever-expanding consumerism. But the economic transformation brought about by the capitalist system is nonetheless dominated by a feeling of angst (which is also the name of the supermarket chain)."
Magda Radu
Labels:
2007,
performance,
photography
Happy Sunday
at MNAC
2007
dimensions variable
[This performance / installation was work of the month (May 2007) at the Contemporary Art Museum in Bucharest. The performance consisted in me laying down under a car for two hours as an homage to those repairing their personal automobiles in public space during weekends in Bucharest. The car was placed in such a way that it was making the access difficult as in the Dream Of Bucharest installation. The performance was on the corridor connecting the external lifts to the museum, thus not exactly inside or outside it.]
Photography: Tudor Borduz
Labels:
2007,
installation,
performance
Dream of Bucharest
2007
installation
dimensions variable
Dream of Bucharest at Solitude
As in many other big cities, the situation of the cars in Bucharest is catastrophic. Not dissimilar to the cases of Moscow or Belgrade, the infrastructure of Bucharest has not greatly altered from the socialist times. From the end of Ceauşescu’s regime, 17 years ago, the number of cars has grown continuously each year, so that today there are 1 million cars for 2 million inhabitants! Like in many other cities, the urban landscape of Bucharest itself is affected by the sheer multitude of cars that can or cannot run and can or cannot park in a certain place. Vlad Nancă identifies with an obsession his birth place to the national Romanian car, Dacia 1300, built after the long forgotten Renault 12 at the beginning of the 70’s. Moreover, Vlad Nancă sees in Dacia the absolute metaphor of a society in stand by mode as it was in the time of Ceausescu: for 30 years Dacia 1300 was produced and sold without the slightest technical modification. In the post-socialist Bucharest, the new turbo capitalism with its huge adverts, its global brands of consumption and arrogant cars of the nouveau riche, this neoliberalism is thus confronted with the numerous traces left by the 30 years of political and economic idleness that Dacia so obviously embodies.
The works of Vlad Nancă are displayed predominantly in the public space, so they can seldom if at all be seen in art galleries. Both in Bucharest and outside he is known to be the promoter of a number of graffiti actions. Among other examples of this everywhere in Bucharest one can see car silhouettes that the artist has drawn in marker on walls, some of which can be seen in this exhibition.
In the installation »Dream of Bucharest«, the car becomes a ghostly factor of inconvenience (white on white) on the narrow corridor of Akademie Schloss Solitude: the 12 silhouettes of a white Dacia block the way obliging the viewer to walk around them as they do in Bucharest, where pedestrians have to make their way aside from the traffic and the parked cars. The guests and residents of Solitude can now share this dream, or rather nightmare of Bucharest. Behind each of the silhouettes Vlad Nancă displays photos, video material and sketches from his own notebooks. They are all recurrent motifs of his urban obsessions: the simplified profile of Dacia, the black balloon stamped with a terrorist figure on it, cars with their windscreen wipers up, like cut off wings of some mechanical birds and Maggi’s logo. All of these images and signs are remains of and references to previous projects that the artist drew or posted on pavements or walls. At the end of the corridor the artist can be seen drawing lots of Dacia silhouettes on a bridge behind Solitude castle. All of these are reiterated, obsessive gestures which replicate the automated production. Through his work Vlad Nancă denounces the aesthetic deficiency of the Romanian society generating this way some little and quiet inconveniences in the beautiful and well protected landscape of Akademie Schloss Solitude. The next stage of this creation and of other creations of Vlad Nancă will be at Galeria Nouă in Bucharest, a gallery that Solitude has collaborated with for the past two years.
Jean Baptiste Joly
Akademie Schloss Solitude, 25 January 2007
Labels:
2007,
installation
cars
2005-2007
marker, chalk, dust graffiti and stencil
[As the Romanian economy is growing, signs of prosperity are appearing all over the place. In
The simple car shape is an inspiration from the basic
The dot to dot stencil graffiti is an encouragement for the people to start drawing the car shapes.
The graffiti car shapes are also the staring point of a more complex installation I did in January 2007 at Akademie Schloss Solitude. ]
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
2007
vinyl banner
1.3 x 27 m
[This is my work for TVR - Romanian State Television's 50th Anniversary when several artists were commissioned to do a work which would be kept on the television premises for a year. I am using Gil Scott Heron’s famous words as a comment on the authenticity of the Romanian Revolution of 1989, supposedly the first revolution ever to be transmitted live on television.]
National Redemption Cathedral billboard
2006
billboard
3 x 6 m
[Bucharest, August 2006. This construction site pannel mockup is a continuation of the Proposal for the National Redemption Cathedral project. The billboard was near Casa Poporului and the location of the future Cathedral.]
Terrorist Balloon
2005
print on balloon
dimensions variable
[The Terrorist Balloon is my answer the question of terrorism. It's something little that needs to be inflated and played with in order to have some fun. When inflated it needs to be treated carefully so it doesn't pop. The balloon was first shown at the Errorism exhibition at DSBA].
Labels:
2005,
installation
Holy Grill
2005
metal, wood, fire and meat
150h x 90w x 70d
“Vlad Nancă’s Holy Grill collapses religion as the endless celebration of the dead and reinforcement of stereotypes and on the other hand default communitarian feelings expressed in plentiful barbecues and congregational passivity. The uncanny metal hybrid, designed with the twofold purpose of burning candles and meat, belongs to a country with an identitary fixation, whose political and spiritual leaders take frequent historical trips in search of the essence of the Grail of national spirit and return, among other relics, with the certainty that the country needs a Cathedral, where masses can convene to rehearse ‘national redemption’. The secular and the religious are intermingled in the piece as they are confused in life. Dysfunctions overlap and misunderstandings proceed in tandem, slightly blurred by the smoke of candles and 1st of May sausages. Through the reference to those specious forms of fraternal solidarity occasioned by political events or religious celebrations and otherwise severely discouraged, smoke indicates here not the presence of fire, but the smoking ruin of populism.”
Mihnea Mircan
[The images above are from the Social Cooking exhibition opening - 14 December 2007 at NGBK Berlin. See the Holy Grill first time I showed it part of my Errorism exhibition at DSBA in Bucharest - 2 October 2005 and second time at Janek Simon's Madagascar exhibition in Lodz, Poland - 19 November 2006.]
Labels:
2005,
installation
Maggi / Muie
“Maggi” soups advertising and “Muie” counter campaign, with Milos Jovanovic
2005
mixed media
Following the Nestle campaign for Maggi soups in May 2005, together with graphic designer Milos Jovanovic we produced a counter campaign for what was the most immoral use of private-space-with-public-exposure advertising campaign ever imagined. In April – June 2005, anyone who displayed the Maggi logo in their apartment window would then presumably be spotted by the Maggi Squad and be rewarded €100 for each Maggi product they had in their kitchen. This turned thousands of people’s private apartment windows into advertising spaces at no cost. Nestle Corporation took advantage of people’s poverty and dreams of easy money. Something had to be done so we produced a counter campaign which also proved to have an eneormous success. We replaced the word “Maggi” on the logo with “Muie!” a slang term for 'Blow Job', which in fact has more of a 'Fuck You!' connotation to it. In one single day a website dedicated to to the counter campaign was reached by 30.000 visitors via emailing groups and weblogs. It was the first culture jamming campaign in Romania. This resulted in us being threatend with a lawsuit by Nestle, being questioned by the Police but eventually it all finished with an agreement between Neste and the Police that we would be fined $2000 for “the promotion of materials with explicit content on the internet”.
Labels:
2005,
culture jamming,
poster,
sticker,
street
Armors for a DIY Revolution
2004
DYI materials, plastic, foam, ropes, clothes, models
dimensions variable
[As my interest in the alternative cultural movements was growing I was amazed by the anti G8, anti capitalist, anti war demonstration throughout the world. For the final exhibition after a workshop in Luxembourg (the country where the first steps towards the creation of the European Union were made, one of the most peaceful cities in Europe) I constructed, tried on and tested DIY armors inspired by the ones made by the demonstrators.]
Labels:
2004,
installation
Proposal for the National Redemption Cathedral
2004
poster
50 x 70 cm
"When the news spread that the Romanian Orthodox intends to erect a monumental ‘Cathedral of National Redemption’, the artist proposed a morphing, a quick solution to both problems: the House itself can become a cathedral, by simply adding the generally recognizable signs of piety in the public sphere, dome and cross. No other adjustments would have been necessary to accommodate the new breed of megalomania, in the context of a perverse alliance between the ideology behind the House and the one evinced by the plans of the Orthodox Church, in a country trapped somewhere between the 19th and 21st century, still boasting its role in the Middle Ages as “defenders of faith” and where populist initiatives can display a remarkable opacity to the present and its imperative questions. Made last year, Vlad’s proposal brought together theoretically disparate realities; yet recent developments have confirmed what appeared at first to be no more than a quirk. Those disparate realities have come to articulate a closed, inescapable network, proving the artist’s derision prescient. After a few possible locations for the Cathedral were rejected, the site under consideration now is precisely the lawn in the back of the House, the only impediment being that the foundation of the Cathedral might affect the underground defense tunnels which spread from the House towards other locations vital for national security. This enfolding of military secret, conspiracy theory, late and falsified religiousness, megalomania and populism qualifies the House as a strange attractor for misplaced ambitions and unspoken political desires, as well as the perfect backdrop for acting out the post-communist syndrome. If the plan of church-plus-government is to enlist the support of that segment of population which needs this cathedral, and meanwhile safeguard the imperial isolation of the House, then the project of the Cathedral can work. If the plan is to cover the whole idea – and necessity – of urbanizing the House with a thick layer of ridicule, then the project is truly advisable. If the grandiosely confused plan is to build a sacred counterpart to the obscene violence of the House of the People, then the project is ill-advised. So is any thought that this might infuse life to an entire area ravaged by communist urbanism, or trigger the post-traumatic process."
Mihnea Mircan
Excerpt from “COMMUNITY WORK” – A Report . Originally published in catalogue of the exhibition PARADOXES. THE EMBODIED CITY, Gulbenkian Foundation,
Dacia - 30 years of social history
2003
Slideshow on DVD
4’44”
"Nanca's photographs of Dacia cars loop on a computer screen. The circularity in their presentation parallels to the production of the car in Romania for a twenty five year period without a major change in its design. The very minute alteration on the original Renault 12 design produced a quality of locality and to veil the fact that the know-how was in fact imported this car was baptised with a name that refers to the soil of Romanian essence, an ancient root imaginatively employed for claiming the continuity of national spirit. Not being courageous enough to vision a future to come, but mistakenly fall back to the prisons of a past, this car started to illustrate allegorically the mental and economic stasis of a whole country (and ideology). Far from small but gradual subversions of a peripheral culture that takes the discourse of the central culture and displaces it playfully -as affirmed in Homi Bhabha's theoretical work-, the Dacia came to symbolise ossification and establishment of poverty. Nanca's use of them is perhaps an elegiac farewell to one of the objects that defined his urbanscape from his birth on, but also a progressive attempt to seal off the past."
Erden Kosova
[Patience is a virtue, enjoy the best of the video by watching past the first half!]
Labels:
2003,
installation,
video
Original Adidas
2003
leather stripes on pork feet
dimensions variable
During 1980's Romania, the toughes economical period in recent history, you could hardly find anything in the shops. You could sometimes buy pork's feet, pork's heads or chicken claws. Humour was a way for people to cope with it all, thus they called the pork heads 'calculators', the chicken claws 'cutlery' and the pork feet 'adidas' (Romanian for sport shoe). By branding the 'original adidas' I am trying to remind people of their recent past now when consumerism is on its peak and the focus on brand is higher than ever.
Labels:
2003,
installation
Eminemscu show
2003
stencil graffiti
"The small stencil detournement that plays on the phonetic similarity between the names of Romania's national poet Eminescu and contemporary hip-hop star Eminem illustrates the current confusion in the country which is squeezed between the introversion of a societal collectivity typical to periods of crises and the showering of globally rotating signifiers of spectacle, in which the icons of the different ideological constellations bleed into each other."
Erden Kosova
Labels:
2003,
stencil graffiti,
street
I do not know what union I want to belong to anymore
2003
screen print on textile
90x60cm each
"One of these works, I do not know what union I want to belong to anymore, illustrates the confusion on the continuities and ruptures between Romanian near past and future. The dizzying shift between the two, once warring ideological continents, the state-communism of Eastern Europe and liberal social democracy of Western Europe is being represented in that piece by two flags. One of them bares the sickle and hammer combination used by the USSR and the other has the circular twelve stars of the EU on it. Will the latter truly replace the former? Is the EU-membership really the only viable alternative for Romania-in-transition still trying to heal the traumas of its nightmarish past? Does the coercive reformatting of the country somehow reiterate the over-regulations of bureau communism? Nanca’s sardonic swap between the colours of the two flags (blue & yellow USSR flag and red & yellow EU flag) points at that confusion among the Romanian minds in regard to their national identity through the graphic split of the national tricolour into the insignia of two trans-national entities."
Erden Kosova
Labels:
2003,
installation
