“If to collect photographs is to collect the world…”
Aurora Király, Iosif Király, Larisa Crunțeanu, Matei Bejenaru
November 26 – December 30, 2021
Anca Poterasu Gallery @Waldburger Wouters Boulevard d’Anvers, 49, Brussels
We are happy to invite you to the opening show and curator-artist talk “Borrowed Memories” on the evening of Friday, 26th November, starting at 18.00h in Brussels at the Waldburger Wouters space. Curator Diana Campbell and artists Matei Bejenaru and Larisa Crunțeanu will approach the topic of international collaboration and residencies, sharing from their own curatorial and artistic experiences in different geopolitical contexts and related to the group exhibition opening the same night.
The exhibition organized by Anca Poterasu Gallery in Brussels is hosted by Waldburger Wouters and is part of a wider series of creative residencies and international project spaces, in the attempt to give way to new connections between Eastern Europe and the West.
“Matei Bejenaru’s performance project documented in the photographic tryptic ”L’Air du Temps” expressed at the time the pathos of a young artist whose options were limited to a slow socioeconomic transition in Romania.”
Aurora Király explores how the mind record, relives, remembers, working with installation in a variety of media, at the intersection of photography with textile art, drawing or installations. In the Reconnection (2015 – 2016) series, Aurora Király is conjuring the phantasmagorical imagery of the forest, juxtaposing with glass-engraved words, text over image. Her walk through the Varatec region in Romania becomes a moment suspended in time, full of associations and connections made with nature, where a fallen tree resembles a reaching arm, or otherwise carries the resemblance of a Pan’s Labyrinth-like creature. Image selection becomes reality and the series Viewfinder Clash (2020 – 2021)further appeals to one of the oldest forms of image-making with black and white negative glass dry plates. There is a poetic dissonance to the plexiglass framing of the box-like objects, further enhanced by the abstract effect of the images depicting fragments of landscape photography.
Iosif Király’s iconic work with photography assemblages investigates the relationship between perception, time, synchronicity, and memory. His ”Synapses” (2020 – 2021) and Reconstructions (2002 – 2003) series depict striding loops of events in the flux of geological, political, historical, and personal timelines. The work expands in time, with hundreds of images brought together in one frame in an ulterior moment of reflection and recollection. The decisive moment is delayed until a new configuration is created and even then, the viewer is invited to imagine other possibilities in open-ended images. Larisa Crunțeanu takes the exhibition beyond the present moment, in an anterior future. The absence, which is not nothingness, feeds the need of the mind for linearity, of stories that anchor the present.
Larisa Crunțeanu’s sound and print installation ”Borowed memories” accentuates the presence of an ever-witness, who observes and reacts, displaces itself and others in order to occupy various perspectives and meanings. A space out of space rendered through the lament song performed by Larisa Crunțeanu is to be an isolating experience through an otherwise shared reflection on death, what comes next, what remains, what is forgotten.
