Silvia Amancei & Bogdan Armanu

When Atoms Collide and Disturb Entropy

October 24 - December 20, 2017

Is it possible to imagine a future different from the one dictated by today’s dominant economic and discursive systems? What role can art play in altering the course of history, especially when revolutions often appear destined to fail? How might artistic imagination inspire alternative ways of understanding the present and the world we inhabit, while generating its own resources to provoke critical thinking?

The solo exhibition of Silvia Amancei and Bogdan Armanu at ElectroPutere Gallery emerges from a rich artistic research that weaves together fragments of socialist science fiction, the recent history of the working class, and post-Marxist socio-critical theory. The resulting art installation presents a fictional exercise in situating oneself within the non-place and non-time of utopian thinking. Through a futurological lens, the artists employ critical, reflective, and progressive nostalgia—drawing upon the unrealized possibilities of the historical past and leftist political thought. These conceptual strategies allow them to construct scenographic and emotionally fluid visual narratives that challenge conventional perspectives.

The exhibited works, created using precarious materials that formally reflect the social instability they critique, are arranged as a Gesamtkunstwerk. Through the use of aesthetic prostheses, the installation stages a confrontation of political concepts within a poetics of possible worlds and futures. Simultaneously, a deliberately pessimistic undertone interrogates the capacity of art to resist instrumentalization and to enact social transformation in a context of pervasive precariousness.

The works grapple with the tension between utopian projection and revolutionary ethos, capturing these ideals in their raw, aspirational state before they are subsumed by the entanglements of ideological and discursive constellations. By doing so, the artists explore the fleeting moments of possibility within collective imagination, even as they question the viability of art as a tool for systemic change

Curated by: Cristian Nae