Blood, Stop, Space, Gold

About

Being engaged in a ceaseless process of negotiation and construction, the body is seen today as something which needs to be permanently invented and reinvented through strategies of self–projection, identification, rejection, adaptation, empathy, in a plural and fluid matter. The exhibition Blood, Stop, Space, Gold questions the topics of embodiment, appearance and touching through the four artistic discourses selected here. A part of these views and inquires turn also to gender and sexual permanent role playing, as well as the dichotomy private and public in relation to this issue. Today, more than ever, the power of human interaction creates a “contact crisis”, as Nona Inescu argues. “As members of human society, perhaps the most difficult task we face daily is that of touching one another – whether the touch is physical, moral, emotional, or imaginary.” (Anne Carson, from Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek). In her video, “Where touch begins, we are” Nona Inescu reflects on intimacy and sensuality – the human body can expand infinitely, blurring the borders of the individual and the surroundings through touch.

Ana Adam employs drawing as an empowering tool, “a daily alchemy” capable of immortalizing the almost-unseen, the energy, the wake of actions, summarized by her artistic credo: I am both the character and the creator. The fragmentation of the self is reflected in the plural stories unfolding in Larisa Sitar’s digital collages, where the archive becomes an open source about human relations and interactions unfolding in a fictional historical story. Emilio Rojas invokes the border as a critical tool, or as feminist theorist Gloria Anzaldúa describes it – “an open wound”, exploring questions about exploitation and neocolonization. The red velvet unfolding in the exhibition space triggers one’s attention to surroundings and gestures loaded with the impulse of transgression. The impulse of reacting and interacting is also present in Ana Adam’s installation of soaps – vehicles of discovering inner messages, but also washing off an emotional burden.

Contact and touching are rarely symmetrical and the dual experiences of touching and being touched reveal different sides of exposure and concealment. “As a concept, touch is ambivalent: it is more intimate than sight, which has been the traditional metaphor for knowledge in Western thinking. Yet touching is also about grasping or understanding, as in it we are taking hold of something.” (Saara Hacklin, To Touch and Be Touched: Affective, Immersive and Critical Contemporary Art?)

Diana Marincu