Mona Vatamanu & Florin Tudor
dal 31/5/2012 al 6/7/2012
Segnalato da
31/5/2012
Mona Vatamanu & Florin Tudor
Daad Galerie, Berlin
The order of things. In their installations, performance or videos, the artists engage with the City and architecture, often in the former Eastern Bloc, and in this case, especially by condensing traces of the past.
In their installations, performance or videos, Mona Vătămanu and Florin Tudor
engage with the City and architecture, often in the former Eastern Bloc, and in this
case, especially by condensing traces of the past. In the gaps and tears in the urban
fabric, Mona Vătămanu and Florin Tudor track down the wounds of history. They use
prefabricated buildings to illuminate questions about contemporary life in an
architecture that speaks the ideology of the dead system, in which they have been
erected. However, by confronting the inheritance of the real-existing socialism in
repressive and unjust systems, it’s not only about working out displaced history, but
also about the changed conditions of the present: the political and economic situation
after the change of systems and life under the rule of total capitalism.
Starting from motifs of architecture and urbanism, Vătămanu und Tudor combine
abstract history and memory in poetic acts and performative gestures. Social and
political issues are not directly represented in images or forms, but the fictional and
constructed character of their representation is pointed out. Performative gestures and
bits and pieces of stories are embedded in partially contradictory narratives. This is
what makes it possible at all to analyze political contexts and actually makes them
visible in the first place.
The exhibition „The order of things“ brings together several new works developed in
Berlin during the past year. Among them the films „Olympia“ (2010-12) und „The
order of things“ (2011-12) (both 16mm and other formats on DVD) presented in a
film-installation together with the earlier film “Rite of spring” (2011, 8mm/DVD). “Rite
of spring” was shown at the Venice Biennial in 2011 and at this year’s Oberhausen
Short Film Festival, where film critics positively mentioned it. It shows a typical
children’s game of spring in the streets of Bucharest, which seems to hold a dangerous
and revolutionary potential. “Rite of spring” was filmed in the still unrenovated areas
of Bucharest’s center, close to Ceaușescu’s Palace of the People, which hosts the
Rumanian parliament today. In two news films produced in Berlin, “Olympia” and “The
order of things”, the world is seen as a complex entanglement of competing realities:
In “Olympia” abstract images of bodies moving in (architectonic) space – sometimes
against the backdrop of Berlin’s Olympic stadium - are combined with shots of several
processions of people following different missions. In “The order of things” Vătămanu
und Tudor bring together impressions of lived reality with symbolic forms and meta-
structures. Starting point are different shots taken in Berlin, the attempt to make a
pyramid out of a globe and a poem by the Zimbabwean poet Chirikure Chirikure. The
last piece is a sound installation which evokes a film-like experience of a daily incident
in the streets of Berlin („Film“, 2012).
Image: Rite of spring, 2010, courtesy: the Artist & Berliner Künstlerprogramm / DAAD, copyright: Mona Vătămanu & Florin Tudor
Press contact: artpress – Ute Weingarten
Elisabethkirchstraße 15 | 10115 Berlin +49 30 21961843 | +49 (0)30 4849635 - 0 artpress@uteweingarten.de
Opening: Friday, June 1, 7–9 pm
daadgalerie
Zimmerstr. 90 - 10117 Berlin
Hours: Mo - Sat, 11 am - 6 pm