When Atoms Collide and Disturb Entropy
Silvia Amancei & Bogdan Armanu

Pressrelease

Silvia Amancei & Bogdan Armanu / When Atoms Collide and Disturb Entropy

12 September 17 – 15 October 17

Curated by: Cristian Nae

Is it possible another future than the one prescribed by today’s dominant economic and discursive assemblages? What can art do to change the course of history, when revolutions seem to be doomed to fail? To what extent can artistic imagination stimulate different ways of understanding the present and the world we live in, generating its own resources to mobilize thinking?

The solo show of Silvia Amancei and Bogdan Armanu at ElectroPutere Gallery in Craiova is the result of an artistic research which combines fragments from socialist-science fiction, the recent history of the working class and post-Marxist socio-critical theory. The resulting art installation proposes a fictional exercise of situating in the non-place and non-time of utopian thinking. The futurological exercise and the critical, reflective and progressive use of nostalgia for the unexploited and still unactualized possibilities of the historical past and of leftist political thinking are two favorite conceptual strategies that are employed by the artists in order to construct overtly scenographic and fluid emotional and visual aggregates.

The exhibited works, realized with precarious materials, formally expressing the social instability they encapsulate and comment upon, are disposed as a Gesamtkunswerk. They employ aesthetic prosthesis in order to stage a confrontation of political concepts inside a poetics of possible worlds and futures. At the same time, their pessimist attitude questions the capacities of art to evade instrumentalization and to transform social art in conditions of generalized precariousness. They try to capture the utopian projection and the revolutionary ethos associated with the multitude before the latter are themselves seized by manifold discursive ideological constellations.

Curated by Cristian Nae

Cristian Nae is an associate professor at George Enescu National University of the Arts in Iasi, Romania, where he teaches critical theory, curatorial and exhibition studies, art-historical methodologies, and contemporary art history. His research focuses on exhibition studies and contemporary art history in Central and Eastern Europe after the 1960s, especially on the histories and legacies of conceptual art and the politics of memory.