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!]

Original Adidas

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
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
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