January 29 – February 26, 2022
IOMO Gallery, Combinat, Bucharest [RO]

Faulty Technology meets new and fresh-out-of-the-oven Gentle Agents and they go happily awry!

At the invitation of IOMO Gallery in Bucharest, I collaborated with curator & visual artist Andrei Tudose, in bringing about a new body of work, based on previous research and experiments that I haven’t got around to properly develop further. So, of course, I got very excited and took the opportunity to give away some of the artistic & curatorial control to the visitors and see what happens!

And honestly, it was great! I had hoped that every visitor would participate a little bit, but was in for a surprise for a surprise! Thank you to each and every one who came by and reshuffled the exhibition structure over and over!

“
Life, as we touch it… challenges the established way of interacting with art in a gallery setup. The first segment of the exhibition invites the audience to be part of an artistic game. Ten movable objects – emotional activators, as Sabina Suru calls them, visually bend, and recompose slightly different connotations of a similar metonymy.

The rule is simple – anything mobile can be moved. However, it becomes an incredibly difficult task when lacking a game board. The space is the culmination of the white cube concept – an almost sterile environment, with few anchor points.

Thus the public has the freedom as well as the responsibility to make an emotionally-charged decision on how to interact with art, particularly in the absence of other stimuli. Also, three other different artworks occupy fixed positions, questioning the materiality of the artistic object and of the process. They seemingly offer a guide for spatial orientation but really raise more questions.

The way Sabina Suru opens the artistic process towards a participative act for the viewers is meant as a fuel for an internal dialogue each of us should have: how do we relate to reality, in general, and art, in particular.

A second room is dedicated to this dialogue, an intimate, emotional space, almost like a decompressing guided meditation, that flows on the artist’s video accompanied by Cătălin Crețu’s soundscape.

Life, as we touch it… addresses topics that occupy a considerable share of public mindset: how identity is mediated by technology, how the art world captures tangible and intangible value, how an artist navigates these systems to survive and how an empowered public connects to art and galleries.
“
Excerpt from curatorial text by Andrei Tudose

More info on the exhibition here or here.