Critique of Pure Image - Between Fake and Quotation

The Exhibition

Curated by Dimitrina Sevova

Vlad Nanca

30 years of social history

(video animation, 4’45’’, 2004) and

The Flags

(2 objects, real-size flags, 2004)

Vlad Nanca was born 1979 in Bucharest, Romania, where he works and lives. He had an impressive start on the international art scene in 2004 with several participations in international events and exhibitions. At the same time he is very active in the local scene, with his apartment-gallery “2020 Home Gallery” and surrounding activities and structures: “2020 cartel is preparing the move of the world cultural centers into Central and Eastern Europe in the year 2020.”

20 years of social history: Nanca's photographs of Dacia cars loop on a computer screen. The circularity in their presentation parallels to the production of the car in Romania for a twenty five year period without a major change in its design. The very minute alteration on the original Renault 12 design produced a quality of locality and to veil the fact that the know-how was in fact imported this car was baptised with a name that refers to the soil of Romanian essence, an ancient root imaginatively employed for claiming the continuity of national spirit. (Erden Kosova)

The Flags: The dizzying shift between the two, once warring ideological semi-continents, the state-communism of Eastern Europe and liberal social democracy of Western Europe is taken up by two flags referring them. One of them bares the sickle & hammer combination used by USSR and some of its satellite states, the other bares the circular twelve stars of the EU. Will the latter truly replace the former? Is the EU really the only alternative that is available for Romania still trying to heal the traumas of its nightmarish past? Nanca's sardonic swap between the colours of the two flags points at that confusion but perhaps he is also construing an utopian alternative to prescription marketed as the single solution: a collective rethinking of communism from scratch. (Erden Kosova)