Because in our dreams we took risks

About

Artists: Ioana Bătrânu, Ion Bârlădeanu, Ștefan Bertalan, Michele Bressan, Mircea Cantor, Andrei Chintilă, Harun Farocki & Andrei Ujică, Constantin Flondor, Adrian Ghenie, Bogdan Gîrbovan, Ion Grigorescu, Radu Grindei, Ana Lupaș, Alex Mirutziu, Florin Mitroi, Vlad Nancă, Miklos Onucsan, Andrei Pandele, Christian Paraschiv, Șerban Savu, Decebal Scriba

Curator: Diana Marincu

The title of the exhibition is inspired by a poem-manifesto written by artist Alex Mirutziu in 2015. "Because in our dreams we took risks", one of the lines of this manifesto, transforms the burden of a verdict into a connecting knot for different generations. This knot temporarily weaves together chronological threads, historical narratives and cultural landmarks that make up a multi-layered image of the art before and after 1989, as it is represented in the present exhibition – a cut-out from the Ovidiu Şandor collection. Taken as a landmark for the change of the political regime and also for the clash between illusions and disillusions, the year 1989 is marked in the exhibition through a documentary section in which photography and film (Andrei Pandele, Radu Grindei, Andrei Ujică & Harun Farocki) claim their power to grasp the instant reality, while the tension between "pure" truth and constructed truth brings out questions that are still valid today.

Another section of the exhibition brings together a series of portraits and self-portraits of the artists, personal microhistories that value their artistic autonomy and the creative laboratory as a space of absolute freedom (Ştefan Bertalan, Constantin Flondor, Adrian Ghenie, Ion Grigorescu, Ana Lupaş, Florin Mitroi, Christian Paraschiv, Decebal Scriba). The artists vacillate between continuous searches of their own identity marks and the lucid scanning of the context surrounding them, of the unaltered reality and its anonymous and marginal actors (Ioana Bătrânu, Ion Bârlădeanu, Michele Bressan, Bogdan Gîrbovan, Şerban Savu), inevitably affected by the events that made history, such as Mineriada, illustrated in the poster of the exhibition The Book (Miklos Onucsan). In parallel, utopian constructions continue, from the colonization of galaxies (Vlad Nancă) and imagining an infinite column that connects the human DNA to outer space (Mircea Cantor), to the dream of immortality that takes the place of existential desperation. Because in our dreams we took risks, after waking up, reality becomes only one face of existence, while remorses and fears fade away.