Larisa Crunțeanu
Curator: Anja Lückenkemper
April 06 – May 11, 2020
Anca Poterașu Gallery– Spinnerei Galleries, Leipzig
Shrill neon-colored curtains mark the entrance to the exhibition space. They form a threshold and clear visual demarcation between what is outside — an objective reality we all seem to agree upon — and the interior, where subjectivities multiply: Pushing through the curtains, we fnd ourselves in the dark limbo of Larisa Crunțeanu’s latest exhibition tale. It is a tale composed of various narratives that are at the same time complementary and conficting: subjective imaginations musing on the idea of contemporary female identities.
70 years ago Simone de Beauvoir wrote in her seminal book Le Deuxième Sexe „On ne nait pas une femme, on le devient [en: One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman].“
Keep Forgetting to Forget Me; “me” not “myself”, as Crunțeanu is not referring back to her own person — even though she is performing all the female identities in the exhibition — but rather to a reservoir of uncertainty regarding the subject, who is performing the forgetting. “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” — Crunțeanu’s women are stuck in this becoming. The exhibition space is the rehearsal room, where they test out what female identity could be. An imagining as not-of-this-world, for example, or as a traditional, archaic role model, as a blank space, as a nonhuman organism. Not all attempts are serious, Crunţeanu enjoys the absurdity. But nevertheless: their compilation and especially the ongoing impossibility to defne a picture, an identity of a self, show an inescapable seriousness.
