July 1st – 26th 2021

REALITIES
/ Sabina Suru – shimmering glimpses into iaval
/ Andrei Tudose – Odd Traces of Life

And it finally happened – our first duo-show!

I have discovered this amazing artist a couple of years ago, while deciding to apply for a late photography-focused MA (because why not?). Andrei was doing the same. Some sort of weird (and beautiful) synch. We started talking about this and that – you know, small talk.
But that didn’t work out, it took us a little over 3 minutes to start talking about ideas, technology, art. Two years later and I am still flabbergasted by how he builds everything in his mind long before anything tangible appears.

We have been supporting each other in trying ever more difficult things – in my case, silver-based holography; in his case, a psychogeography driven photo-project. In a way, we have been each other’s assistant throughout this last couple of years and now it’s time to take these projects out of the darkroom and send into the world.

We’ve had support from so many beautiful people in making these projects happen!
One of them is Anca Ușurelu who wrote such a lovely text for the exhibition (thank you, Anca! You are amazing, and I hope you know it!):

“How do we define reality? The positions of observation and participation in the common space-time, which we usually refer to as ‘reality’, are infinite, from the cellular to the human or even the planetary level. They manifest, intersect, and affect each other, actively and passively constructing realities of various forms, whose imperceptible aspects are revealed through the two artists’ processes of investigation.

Realities proposes a meditation on the ways in which personal, relational, and speculative-fictional realities are formed, beginning from pre-existing, but permanently transforming, artefacts, symbolic and social systems. The possibilities of co-living, interpretation, and fictionalization of the different spatial-temporal dimensions that humans can contemplate and inhabit are explored and represented by Sabina Suru and Andrei Tudose through two focal points – the speculative-fictional space and the public-urban space.

The two artists bring us into the spaces they have researched and invite us to inhabit, at least temporarily, two distinct but complementary worlds. As such, the spectators dwell in the position of the researcher themselves. The world populated by the iavalian beings, which is found in an unobservable dimension of space, is discovered by Sabina through the laborious technology of silver-based holography. At the same time, Andrei presents another often-unnoticed dimension, that of the public space which we inhabit in our day to day lives. Through the photographic assemblages in the exhibition, he fragments and recomposes iconic places in Bucharest, in a gentle instigation to assume and consciously inhabit the city.

Through a visual-narrative exploration of the dynamics between fictional and factual space, Realities invites us to question the pre-established ways in which we perceive, imagine, and construct individual, symbolic and relational realities.”