vlad nancă works

Backgammon chair

2011-09-27T08:36:00.001-07:00

2011

wood

White

2011-09-27T08:32:00.000-07:00

after Ana Lupas

2011
With sound by Sillyconductor
wood frames, cotton textile, sound

approx 1200 x 300 x 200 cm

Drumul

2011-09-27T08:27:00.000-07:00

Pentru Ioana

2011
trestles, table top, candles

To the memory of Ioana Nemes [1979 - 2011]

Frunza

2011-09-27T08:13:00.000-07:00

2011

bricks, mortar, ficus plants
aprox. 963 x 675 x 40 cm

[Frunza (Rom. word for "the leaf") is an installation inspired by a children's game from 1980's Romania. The construction follows the shape of the game in which two teams had as a goal conquering the furthest corner of the opposite side. The shape was drawn by chalk on the tarmac of the streets in different towns in Romania... The game was rather physical, with lots of pushing and pulling involved, quite often with children getting minor injuries.

The lines of the game shape are elevated into a small height wall, giving you the feel of an abandoned foundation of building, a possible urban garden, an apparently simple but intricate construction with a vague and difficult to identify purpose]

WIND

2011-09-27T07:31:00.000-07:00

2011

cotton motorcycle cover, fans

Flower pots

2011-09-27T07:20:00.000-07:00

2011
hand painted ceramic pots, indoor plants

Works

2010-10-13T06:19:00.001-07:00

Tripod on wheels

cherry wood, steel wheels

95 x 40 x 40 cm

Portal

birch wood

150 x 75 x 75 cm

Mattress

740 x 100 x 14 cm

Box on wheels with corrugated pipes

wood, metallic wheels, corrugated pipe

Funnels

plastic and metallic funnels

dimensions variable

Concrete bag on wheels

aprox 60 x 40 x 23 cm

View of the exhibition

From the early stages of his artistic production, Vlad Nancă has been taking photos of urban absurdities he was coming across on the streets of Bucharest. In these series, one may take notice of the ways the inhabitants of the city react to the lack or withdrawal of municipal infrastructure and regulations. Their petty solutions, inventions and interventions come out, at times, as surprisingly pragmatic and wise, and sometimes - amusingly silly. Humor comes naturally out of these examples of quotidian-engineering-narratives that oscillate between a yearning for sound regulation of urban space by official authorities and the pursuit of personal liberties.

A recent set of photographic images that Nancă produced for the purpose of studying the dynamics of actual urban situation in the city informs the conceptual framework of his forthcoming solo exhibition at Sabot. They slightly depart from the earlier photographic series by concentrating on a specific topic and choosing critically one particular side of the aforementioned oscillation, which actually forms basic positions of the political field. These photographs depict constellations of daily objects (metal portals brought from construction sites, wooden beams and tripods, iron chains, piled trash and warning ribbons) installed by those who claim parking spots on the streets. These artefacts are left on these parking lots (mostly in front of constructions sites of new housings) to keep others from parking their cars there. Contrasting with their sympathetic clumsiness, these obstructions are brought together by Nancă in order to highlight the erosion of the sense of collectivity and public space. Rather than being innocent examples of pursuit of personal liberties, they appear to be temporary occupations of portions of space that are designated for the indiscriminate use of all citizens. As side products of the recent boom of construction sites throughout the city, they recklessly harm the rhythm of urban flux and illustrate the new dynamics of social life: selfishness and greed.

The tension between the senses of sharing and greed, between collective property and capitalist individualism (with unspecified hints at the political shift in the region's recent past) determines the relationship between the objects of Nancă's solo exhibition. The large wooden box, the central piece of the show, can be conceived as a figuration of Bucharest's current transformation: spatial domination (resonating the scale of ongoing construction projects), luxurious and minimalist outlook (befitting to the aesthetics of contemporary entrepreneurship) and -contrasting with this glossy texture through the awkward appearance of the plastic tubes popping out from the top of the box- dynamism that fails to deliver a sense of completion. The visual and semantic discrepancy between the bulky volume of the wooden box and the sense of mobility implicated by small wheels attached at the base, is repeated in another object of the exhibition: a wheeled bag of cement. As the artist explains, the object is set to represent the promotion of private ownership of automobiles, which -in the times of urban congestion- comes to represent urban annoyance and temporal inefficiency, rather than personal liberties and speed, as it did in the past. Wooden portals and tripods installed at the show illustrate Nancă's ironic gesture to 'squat' the gallery space, just as the objects of obstruction on the streets confiscate portions of the public space.

All these references to the spatial outcomes of intensifying capitalism come in contrast with two other objects. A collection of funnels of different sizes and colours, spread onto the ground of the gallery, interrupts the stylish furniture aesthetics that defines the other objects of the exhibition. The sense of cheapness displayed by means of their plastic surfaces speak of those excluded from the benefits of economic boom and, furthermore, of the aesthetics of the nouveau riche. What the funnel represents is the times and situations of scarcity, and the transference of limited resources from one household to the other. It is an object of frugality and solidarity. The second element that refers to the disprivileged is the disproportionately elongated mattress lying on the gallery ground. Its length of seven meter clearly deviates from the standard king-size bed. It evokes nitty-gritty of sharing house with at least a dozen others. Its industrial appearance brings to mind the cabins arranged for workers, those invisible actors of the construction boom poignantly contrasting with the sense of personal or familial privacy that had been originally promised.

Vlad Nancă's recent works disclose a distinct interest in objecthood of the exhibits and sculptural forms, sometimes with direct references to the minimalist legacy. Yet, this aestheticism does not convey a withdrawal from the social. The objects he employs and reconstructs are either modelled from objects of the quotidian life or taken in fully as ready-mades -a strategy, which allows Nancă to construct networks of meaning through the social codes these objects harbor. (Erden Kosova)

[find here a pdf version of the publication that accompanied this exhibition]

[find here some images of objects that inspired some of the works in the exhibition]

The End

2010-10-02T11:23:00.000-07:00

2010
installation
200 x 200 x 300 cm

"I could have also put this text under the title On the chirality of enclosed spaces. Actually, stereochemistry, crystallography and contradiction principle gave me the proper codes in interpreting Vlad Nanca’s object. Chirality designates a chemical property of non – superimposable molecular compounds, with optical symmetry and structural similarities. Arranged in space, the compounds are situated in perfect mirroring, in a double configuration (as dual mode), but, simultaneously, oriented in opposite directions. +α | -α.

Playing furthermore with contradiction, the installation reveals its fundamental ambiguities. By definition, a chiral compound is an open, moving structure, while Vlad’s assemblage freezes a monolithic one, resembling much more to the static type in a twin crystal than to the molecular dynamics. At a first glance, we could fairly invoke stasis. In his synopsis, Vlad describes the story of two football goals, gloriously embraced in a sort of a “happy end” completely solving the clash, annihilating the game itself and annulling the very possibility of a future conflict through the metamorphosis into the peaceful skeleton of some sort of housing. But since ambiguity endlessly regulates all the transformations in meaning, the same enclosure can easily become cage, trap or prison, subsequently invalidated by the porosity of the reticulated net that launches once again the object in the middle of associative turmoil.

The continuous shift provoked on different levels of signification or taxonomic inventories (it is an object, an installation, a maquette, or an edifice) proves the need for permeable thematic readings, able to test themselves through self-suspension or antiphrasis. Shifting, opposite perspectives could explore (and I feel the need of conjuring now Walter Benjamin) both the methodological, combining potential in dialectic images that fulgurate reality, deregulate and enrich it and the metaphorical potential of so-called “thought-images”/ Denkbilder, where the narrative form conveys theoretical thinking and becomes concept.

The ambiguous object mounted by Vlad formalizes one fundamental polymorphism: as perceptual experience, through amplification at monumental scale he inverts the claustrophobic sensation and, paradoxically, expands it; as dimensional orientation when the object turns out to be a device for counting spatial articulations or pulsations, a counter of our own spatial landmarks around us and for the loss of them; as semiotic density, where the main constituents power the symbolic meaning – goal pillars, linguistic similarities, goal and competition, goal and gate inflexions, gate as passage, gate as threshold, net, blocking net, grid (in transmissions and connexions), formation grid. I believe that is this very semiotic consistency that makes that the ambiguous object “has a lot to say”, keeping itself open (and not necessarily transparent) for interwoven, interlinked analysis.

The English expression “wired grid” mobilizes again reflexive associations. I would like to mention here two famous names of historical conceptualism and minimalism, whose works could give another indentation in this constellation. Trying to test the multiple configurations of reality in its infinite deployment, Robert Smithson has verified the purity in geometric reflective structures in a well-known series inspired by optical isomers: “Enantiomorphic Chambers” (1965). My second example is taken from the canonical context of minimalism. Aspen Magazine’s minimalist number, edited by Brian O’Doherty, has published in 1967 Tony Smith’s project for “The Maze” (crisscrossing of symmetrical and square grids), where the artist imagines a genuine “labyrinth of the mind rather than a monument”, where pathways are consubstantial to the entire design, unwillingly disavowing the impossibility of objective neutrality in art object.

Mirroring the twofoldness of the goals in a perfect enantiomer, Vlad Nanca manages to detour the post-minimalist object through the kissing anecdote (a reminder of Brancusi relenting remnants in our artistic automatisms related to the gate symbolism); and he manages also to dissolve further away, with equal irony, the anecdote in contingency, since he doesn’t want to block the object in simple historiographic reading.

With its proliferating semantics, Vlad Nanca’s object becomes a “dialectic image”. It’s a new way of conceptual expression, filled with subjectivity, gathering the right amount of ambiguity under the tricky appearance of a crystalline symmetry."

Mica Gherghescu

Commemora

2009-12-24T02:54:00.000-08:00

with Mrs Maria Heinke

2009
performance

20 years after the political changes in Central and Eastern Europe, most of the countries in the region have reasons to celebrate. Romania is probably the only one that has to commemorate something, since the events that took place in late December 1989 made thousands of victims only to see the second line of the previous political power installing itself as the new government.

Vlad Nancӑ, whose works are often political, is doing a new installation as a commemoration of the bloody events from December 1989. An old lady is sitting in an armchair in the gallery space, knitting a black scarf. She started working on it in the first day of the exhibition and the plan is to continue to knit every day, her effort resulting in a lengthy scarf, some 10 meters long, enough to put around a person’s entire body. The title of the performance, Commemora illustrates the artist's wish to make a gesture of remembrance of the victims of the 1989 Romanian Revolution. During the bloody days at the end of December 1989 countless news stories were told on television. One of these was of a group of old ladies who had sent knitted socks and gloves to the soldiers guarding the national television building in Bucharest. Picking on the this story Vlad Nancӑ recreates the situation, 20 years later, with the help of Mrs Heinke, who would be “knitting the thread of recent history into a stretched black scarf”. At the end of the exhibition and of the knitting process, the artist will wrap himself in the black scarf as a gesture of commemoration and remembrance.

The Romanian Revolution of 1989 is a key moment in the country’s recent history and Vlad Nancӑ has referred to it in some previous works. For his 2005 Errorism exhibition he produced the ludic Terrorist Balloon – a black balloon resembling a person wearing a balaclava was his impression of the recent terrorism situation with the ‘War against terror’ but also a reference to the 1989 terrorists that were fighting during the hectic days of the Romanian Revolution, terrorists that were never to be found. In 2006 Nancӑ was commissioned to do a work on the celebration of 50 years of the National Television in Bucharest. He then hung up on the television building a 27 metre long banner with the sentence The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. He used 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. A more recent work, which is also present in this exhibition, the Revolution Book, is an artist book in which a series of details of images from the 1989 events are showing a different reading of that momentum. Taken from a photo album entitled The bloody chronicle of Bucharest during the Revolution, very small details cropped from the original photographs, are showing a distinct visual interpretation of the Revolution, focusing on less usual aspects of what the bloody Revolution was. It is a less engaged reading, more serene and rather disconnected from the emotional clutter that such a moment can provoke.

As opposed to his earlier works on the theme, Vlad Nancӑ’s latest works about the Revolution shift from being somewhat impassive, provocative and ironic, to being more sensitive, insightful and commemorative but are still questioning. As the artists puts it: “The events that took place 20 years ago in Bucharest are still to be clarified, juridical investigations are undergoing but no sign of an elucidation is to be expected any time soon. The only thing that one can do is to remember and honour the people who gave their life for freedom.”

Hyphen

2009-11-24T07:42:00.000-08:00

with Nona Inescu

2009

[photograph by Tudor Prisacariu]

Untitled

2009-11-24T07:36:00.000-08:00

2009
fire wood, gold leaf
dimensions variable

Untitled (Sheppard’s Coat Hung on a Nail)

2009-11-24T07:29:00.001-08:00

2009
sheep fur, nail

Revolution

2009-11-24T07:24:00.000-08:00

2009
artist book
14x22cm

Homage

2009-11-24T07:20:00.000-08:00

2009
blanket, B&W tv set
dimensions variable

Queue

2009-11-24T07:05:00.000-08:00

2009
porcelain animal figurines placed in order of height
dimensions variable

Wonder

2009-11-24T06:47:00.000-08:00

2009
Byzantine icon, hidden tears mechanism
18x22cm

Funeral Wreaths

2008-10-09T14:32:00.000-07:00

with Mircea Nicolae

Chisinau, 2008
performance

[Two funeral wreaths (80 x 60 cm, blue / yellow / red paper flowers, plastic thread) worn as backpacks between the statue of Stephen the Great in the proximity of the Republic of Moldova Government building, Lenin’s statue from the Moldexpo Park and the empty pedestal of a monument that was being restored in front of the History Museum in Chisinau, Republic of Moldova.

This action makes an ironic re-evaluation of the ceremonial pilgrimage towards the places consecrated by public monuments. The authors also question the ritual gesture of placing flowers in front of these monuments. The overall intention is to underline the construct that lies behind the visual discourse specific to this means of communication through the use of which the political power shapes the collective consciousness of the population. The ritual set of gestures that these places imply, as well as the presumed adhesion of the viewer to this pre-defined set of gestures are also underlined. By wearing the funeral wreaths as backpacks of potential tourists, the possibility of an irreverent pilgrimage is created, one that can deconstruct the conventional gestures associated with this behavior, thus questioning the values that these places of memory communicate to the viewer.

It is important to point out the fact that Lenin’s statue from the Moldexpo Park was removed from its original location in front of the Republic of Moldova Government building, where it stood during the Soviet period. Also, the statue of Stephen the Great was installed in a series of successive locations. Some of the displacements were due to the symbolic conflict between Soviet ideology embodied in Lenin’s statue, and Moldavian nationalist ideology. The last location of this action – the empty pedestal of the monument that is currently being restored in front of the History Museum – underlines the following observation: public monuments aim at rendering eternal a set of chosen collective symbols and values, but the statues themselves are temporary, mobile and unstable within the built space of the city. They are also continuously re-shaped and re-placed by the political power and by its ideological messages that it wishes to communicate to the population.

The action took place one day after the Independence Day of the Republic of Moldova and four days after the commemoration of Moldavia’s liberation by the Soviet Army. This was a moment when these ceremonial gestures reached their highest frequency within public space.]

Flower Bridge

2008-09-09T14:14:00.000-07:00

with Nicoleta Esinencu and Mircea Nicolae

Chisinau, 2008
performance

[The flag of the European Union, the flag of the Republic of Moldova, two wooden poles 3,20 m x 8 cm, set up and abandoned on the banks of the small river that flows through the middle of the dry lake from the Valea Morilor Park, Chisinau, Republic of Moldova. The lake was emptied of water approximately two years ago, and it is said that it will be the place where a future residential complex will be built. The members of the local Comsomol (the youth organization of the Communist Party from the Soviet Union) built this lake at the request of Leonid Brezhnev. Nowadays the lake is a wasteland, full of bushes and small trees, a landscape out of use and in a way, out of history.

The Flower Bridge was created on the 6th of May 1990, within the “Flower bridge across the PrutRepublic of Moldova and the Bucharest-Chisinau Cultural Association. This was a symbolic gesture celebrating the liberation of Romanians living in Moldova from the Soviet rule. It also pointed out the possibility of an eventual union between the Romanian state and the Republic of Moldova. Citizens of Romania and of the Republic of Moldova met on the left bank of the Prut river in the border crossing points of Miorcani-Pererita, Stanca-Costeşti, Sculeni-Sculeni, Ungheni-Ungheni, Albita-Leuşeni, Falciu-Stoianovca, Oancea-Cahul, Galati-Giurgiulesti. They celebrated this event by throwing hundreds of thousands of flowers into the waters of the river. A period of time in which the citizens of these two countries could travel across the border only with their IDs followed. This was discontinued when Romania entered the European Union. It was also consequence of the events that led to the apparition of the Transdniestria region as an independent state. river” action, organized by the “Association of free Romanians from across the globe”, the Popular Front from the Republic of Moldova and the Cultural Association Bucharest-Chisinau.

Today, the Flower Bridge no longer exists in the symbolic imagination of these two countries, and Romanian or Moldavian authorities never mention it. Rather than being nostalgic about a past state of affairs, this intervention highlights the process of creating symbolic objects with abstract existence by the nationalist discourse. Once they have lived their lives and served their purpose, they are silently withdrawn from the collective consciousness, thus becoming mental relics, as they are no longer kept alive by the ideology that brought them into existence.]

Remix exhibition

2008-04-30T10:30:00.000-07:00

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.]

Ideal

2007-12-23T02:21:00.000-08:00

2007
installation
textile, 3x 135x90cm each

[In 1956 during the Hungarian Revolution the communist symbols were torn out of the flags leaving a hole in the middle. The same liberating gesture was repeated in 1989 first in Germany, then again in Hungary and later in Romania. For a few days, in each of these countries the national flag was not only without an emblem but with a hole in the middle. To me this is a symbol of pure freedom, something that could only happen in times of such strong spiritual engagement and idealistic vows. By putting the three flags together I am aiming to realize a spiritual union over-passing time, history and borders. The three countries (and their flags) are connected by the emptiness of the middle of the flag, a union of genuine revolutionary freedom, where no symbols are spoiling the essence of those days of liberty.]

I love shopping!

2007-12-22T10:45:00.000-08:00

2007
b&w photographs
31,5 x 21 cm

"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

If you give it to me I give it to you

2007-12-10T10:43:00.000-08:00

2007
installation, photography
dimensions variable

"Nanca regularly resorts to working with Revolution symbols and the communist era. In his work If you give it to me I give it to you designed for the Art for Fun exhibition he is ironic about the rapid transformation of communist symbols after the fall of the regime. Over the last few years these symbols have gone on from being untouchable to icons of pop culture which have been repeatedly printed on t-shirts, caps and mugs. Nanca combines physics and two symbols in his installation: the hammer and sickle and the Frisbee, - an American leisure symbol-. Several red Frisbees with a hammer and a sickle in relief are at public's disposal to be used in the exhibition room."

David Arlandis and Javier Marroqui

Happy Sunday

2007-05-14T06:05:00.000-07:00

at MNAC

2007
installation, performance
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

Fixing cars

2007-04-14T06:18:00.000-07:00

2007
photography

I <3 manele

2007-03-23T11:53:00.000-07:00

2007
stencil

Dream of Bucharest

2007-01-25T09:49:00.000-08:00

2006
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

2007-01-14T06:40:00.000-08:00

2007

b&w poster
50 x 70 cm

[My poster for the 3500cm2 project (curator Lorenzo Benedetti)]

cars

2007-01-10T08:06:00.000-08:00

2005-2007
marker, chalk, dust graffiti and stencil

[As the Romanian economy is growing, signs of prosperity are appearing all over the place. In Bucharest that is translated to an enormous, ever growing number of cars occupying the streets and the entire public space in the city. In a town that was never designed to have so many cars, the quality of life is decreasing strangely enough because of its prosperity. To underline this situation I started to draw simple car shapes in as many places as possible. I though that the graffitied cars, something generally seen as a violent, vandalizing form of expression, would bring attention to the real problem of the city which is the car pollution.

The simple car shape is an inspiration from the basic Dacia car design which was also the subject of a previous work of mine. It also emphasizes the fact that I cannot draw as my previous training to art was maths and physics.

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

2006-11-14T06:28:00.000-08:00

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.]

Scrachitree

2006-11-11T13:44:00.000-08:00

2006
photography

National Redemption Cathedral billboard

2006-08-23T11:03:00.000-07:00

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.]

Monumentul Erorilor

2005-12-23T10:55:00.000-08:00

Errors' Monument

2005
stencil graffiti

Terrorist Balloon

2005-11-14T05:52:00.000-08:00

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].

In God We Trust

2005-10-23T08:44:00.000-07:00

2005
stencil graffiti

Holy Grill

2005-10-02T09:45:00.000-07:00

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 1^st 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.]

Maggi / Muie

2005-09-23T09:11:00.000-07:00

“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”.

Armors for a DIY Revolution

2004-07-14T02:54:00.000-07:00

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.]

Proposal for the National Redemption Cathedral

2004-06-23T08:26:00.000-07:00

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 19^th and 21^st 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, Lisbon, 2005

Dacia - 30 years of social history

2003-11-23T08:41:00.000-08:00

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!]

Original Adidas

2003-11-22T09:42:00.000-08:00

2003
leather stripes on pork feet
dimensions variable

During 1980's Romania, the toughest 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. Humor 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.

Eminemscu show

2003-06-23T07:38:00.000-07:00

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

I do not know what union I want to belong to anymore

2003-01-14T05:35:00.000-08:00

2003
screen print on textile
90x135cm 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

Down to earth

2002-12-22T10:23:00.000-08:00

See the whole series here.