The Resilience of Capital
Silvia Amancei & Bogdan Armanu

Pressrelease

Exhibition curated by Cristian Nae
15.10 – 12.11.2022

“The Resilience of Capital” is an artistic project that wants to interrogate the fractured relationship between contemporary artistic practices and the possibility of coagulation of social-political discourses through the use of artistic tools. The painting installation presented at the ElectroPutere Gallery explores the register of affectivity as a space of communication, both trans-personal and deeply subjective, having as its starting point its own professional experiences of the last 10 years. According to the artists, “this artistic project can be considered a manifesto of renouncing the trust vested in artistic circles to enunciate critical discourses in the hope of social reform. It presents our subjective position on the processes of artistic and discursive production in a capitalist society where social well-being is continuously eroded, human coexistence being replaced by a state of continuous alertness where competitiveness and lack of empathy become the main human characteristics. “
The new series of paintings proposed by SABA uses the tension between text as image and text as message to insert an indissoluble ambiguity into the reception of the exhibited works. The exhibition space thus becomes a place conducive to skeptical reflection on the aesthetic limits of art, famously defined two decades ago by Jacques Rancière as an attempt to (re)distribute our participation in the political world from the level of sensibility.
The nihilism practiced at the level of the textual message is extended here by undermining the raison d’etre of the artistic object itself. Faded and difficult to recompose visually, the discursive element is conveyed through a brushwork that combines the sober conceptual aspect with the tactile treatment usually applied to the photographic image to highlight the destabilizing effects of collective memory on the reception and construction of the meaning of a consumed experience. The resulting paintings use the simple vocabulary of the political slogan, constantly seized and hijacked by the creative industries to produce and redistribute affects in the social space, recalibrating it into a series of confessions that modulate in various variants, with different intensities and tonalities, the precariousness the artistic condition in a society where the critical function of art is less and less visible.
The exhibition construct subtly evokes a masochistic eroticism, it functions as a fragmentary diary, proposing a chain of psychological states in which language loses its descriptive and narrative function. He suggests that the emotional vocabulary, expressing insecurity, disgust, hopelessness, anger or despair, is perhaps the only one that can diagnose today the distance that is created between art and the needs of society, as well as between individuals trapped in a deeply damaged social tissue.

SABA – Silvia Amancei and Bogdan Armanu (b. 1991, Iași and Timișoara) is an artist couple working together since 2012. Their artistic practice could be positioned at the border between social studies and visual art, researching for methods and examples where art and artistic means can be instrumentalised in order to overexcite the ability to look beyond capitalism and create a (common) future. Among their recent solo shows are “Hope dies last…They say…” (2022, Zagreb, HR), “Together. Forever. In Debt” (2021, Berlin, DE), “s.a.b.a 1979-####” (2020, Ljubljana, SI), “It was always in plain sight” (2020, București, RO), „If Then What After” (2019, Baden, AT), „What Past? What Future?” (2017, Linz, AT), while their works have been present in many group exhibitions, among which “Protozone7: Zones of Kinship, Love & Playbour” (2022, Zurich, CH), “Gangwon Triennale” (2021, Gangwon, KR), “Rewriting Our Imaginations” (2020, Basel, CH), “Displacement and Togetherness” (2019, Brussels, BE), “STRIKE GENTLY AWAY ____” (2019, Salzburg, AT), “Baywatch” (2018, Berlin, DE), “Alternative Facts” (2018, Stuttgart, DE), ”Odessa Biennial” (2017, Odessa, UA), to name just a few.

Partners: Institute for Multidisciplinary Research in the Arts (ICMA), ARTA Magazine, Propagarta, Marin Sorescu National Theater, National University of Arts George Enescu.

Cultural project co-financed by the National Cultural Fund Administration.
The project does not necessarily represent the position of the Administration of the National Cultural Fund. The AFCN is not responsible for the content of the project or the manner in which the results of the project may be used. These are entirely the responsibility of the funding recipient.