Anca Poterașu

About

Opened in May 2011, Anca Poterașu Gallery is a space dedicated to recent and contemporary art and focuses on supporting and promoting art-related initiatives and Romanian curators’ projects.

In 2009, Anca Poterasu launched the Little Yellow Studio, an alternative-space project, which brings a personal touch to the group and focuses on theme shows, performances, meetings and interactive discussions.

In May 2011, the Gallery moved into a new location, on Plantelor Street, Bucharest 2, in a former inn dating from the turn of the last century. The relocation marks a transition from an alternative to an official formula, from a studio project to a gallery.

The Anca Poterașu Gallery represents established as well as young upcoming artists, and aims to place them in the international art circuit. These include : Calin Dan, Daniel Djamo, Donald Simionoiu, Eeva Kukoonen, Florin Mitroi, Gheorghe Rasovszky, Irina Botea, Iulian Bisericaru, Lea Rasovszky, Nicu Ilfoveanu, Oana Farcas, Zoltán Béla.

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26 Popa Soare Street, Bucharest

Friday – Sunday: 15 – 19

*during the week only by appointment

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CALIN DAN – THE NIGHT FALLS WITHOUT A WARNING

Anca Poterasu Gallery is delighted to invite you on Thursday, April the 2nd from 7:00 PM to the opening of Calin Dan’s solo exhibition The Night Falls Without a Warning.

Inspired by the melancholy spaces of the 19th century apartments hosting the gallery, Calin Dan builds the map of a journey from birth to nothing using various leftovers of the everyday. This second solo show with Anca Poterasu Gallery is unveiling an unknown dimension of the artist, as a discrete mediator between the liberating nonsense of the matter and the oppressive immateriality of fear.

Calin Dan (multi-media artist, b. 1955 Arad, Romania; based in Amsterdam/Bucharest). Calin Dan reached international acclaim with his videos from the series Emotional Architecture, showcased in film festivals (Osnabrück, Oberhausen, Rotterdam, La Rochelle), art biennales (Venice, Sao Paolo, Prague, Sydney), art museums, and galleries throughout Europe, the USA and Australia. He was awarded in 2000 the media prize of the Split Film festival, and in 2001 the prize of Videonale Bonn.

His videos are distributed by Video Databank, Chicago.

WHAT ABOUT POOR GREGOR SAMSA?

Artists: Serioja Bocsok, Irina Bujor, Andreea Dobrin, Andra Jurgiu, Andrei Mateescu & Sabin Gârea, Alexandra Mocan, Maia Ștefana Oprea, Diana Oțet, Cassandra Pop and Sabina Suru

Curator: Ioana Mandeal

Graphic design: Andreea Dobrin

As the outcome of an open call addressed to emerging artists in November 2014, this project aims to move along the lines of activity initiated by the gallery in 2012, when a first call for projects generated the exhibition Five In The House.

With this second edition of the Open Call program, Anca Poterasu Gallery wishes to consolidate its policy of supporting young visual artists, by providing them – every two years – with a framework for professional exhibiting and a dynamic work environment.

The challenge set forth by the call “What About Poor Gregor Samsa?” entailed an exercise of imagination, the conceptual basis of which has been the well-known kafkian character of The Metamorphosis. In a reality marked by often unpredictable and disorderly shifts, Gregor Samsa is remarkably contemporary. The current character – at times haunted by the residue of a faint feeling of malaise – crosses, in his turn, dissonant landscapes, engaged in a process of uncontrollable mutations.

By carefully looking into the borders between reality and possibility, finality and vision, suspension and response, or amnesia and recollection, the call for projects has encouraged alternative approaches and scenarios of the positioning inside and the critical outlook on the parameters of the current historical, social and cultural reality.

The exhibition circuit created through the proposals of the 11 artists outlines potential answers to the question “What about poor Gregor Samsa?” trying to determine the extent to which the mechanisms of confronting contemporaneity may transcend the trap of the elegy or the burden of suspension by means of an analytic, constructive or prospective “look”.

Partner: Aqua Carpatica

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Curatorial Text:

One fine morning, Gregor Samsa, the character of the kafkian novella, finds himself the subject of a violent and incomprehensible mutation. It is the world reversed and yet this world somehow maintains itself in an unknown balance – its framework is in crisis. In this disrupted, unsure mapping of the absurd bordering with the rational, the continual collision between essence and appearance, affirmation and negation, the meaningful and the meaningless is playing itself out. The metamorphosis is irreversible, the conscience remains split, movements are locked within a compressed universe which the body could not possibly transgress.

Facing this deeply fissured state, the gaze becomes the nucleus of knowledge – the necessary tool to circumscribe reality. The enclosed space of four walls is where Gregor lies, (fore)feeling, recording, mapping out and analyzing from a single, fixed point the perpetual movement of the world, ultimately assisting at the dissolution of his existential framework in its entirety. He opposes, resists, awaits, accepts, fades away – following a regressive structure upon which only a sense of responsibility (social, moral) may exert some – limited – amount of control. His gradual submersion overlaps with the failure of the effort to know, in which the processing of the images from a flashing reality, unraveling on the retina, remains unadjusted to his own imaginarium. In these circumstances, Gregor tragically becomes a failing receptor and epistemologist. Perhaps his innocence (in front of the image) has been fatal? Perhaps his questions may not have been sufficiently acute? Perhaps the eye has not been sufficiently alert or effective? Perhaps… ?

An essentially liminal presence, Gregor Samsa illustrates the extreme image of a situation of transition (passage), operating in extenso as a possible model of understanding contemporaneity. The tensions, the contrasts and the inadvertencies of current experiences articulate conditions and intermediate spaces, in which dualities cohabit, paradoxically, along fragile border points, strips ambivalent par excellence, or – in other words – folds. This intermediary stylistic device, diagnosed by Gilles Deleuze as a fundamentally baroque mode of operating, translates into a state of emerging plurality – an oscillating temporal and spatial fabric, always unpredictable, always unstable. The constructive force of “the fold” is the one which ultimately determines the resolving of antinomies: through their incorporation, it enables their simultaneous annulling, reconciliation and their therapeutic treating. The inside and the outside, the enclosed and the open, the positive and the negative shall both contain and digest one other.

Inquiring upon the space of (re)action, which is delivered by the conflictual image of contemporaneity entails, in this light, a lucid, active positioning inside “the fold”. What about poor Gregor Samsa? How can we deal with the neuralgic points of reality? How do we drill into the same blind points of history?

The spaces of the samsian circuit as put forth are successively folding, un-folding and re-folding in ways that invite us to reflect upon a mapping of the framework-limit itself. Assuming search as an itinerary, a process, a flow or a state of transition, shapes a mental architecture, in which scientific perspective coexists with the solutions of the imaginarium, historical responsibility with the anchoring inside everydayness, and critical deconstruction with the lightness of humor. Above this entire assembly there is the hovering of the disruptive pulse belonging to some peculiar resonance box: a sound emitter (or shall we call it a laughter-machine?) – an anarchic and enigmatic, volatile but iridescent chain of immaterial actions and reactions. Beyond the sound, through one final pulsation stems out the “the fold of the image” as such: that dialectic of truth(authenticity) and fiction, which invites the viewer “to fold and unfold the image with care and to crease it so as to bring together those areas which by then had been ignoring one another, opening them wide.” (Georges Didi-Huberman).

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Ioana Mandeal (b. 1986) is an art critic and curator with an educational background in European Cultural Studies and Art History and Theory in Bucharest and Visual Cultures and Curatorial Practices in Milan. Currently a PhD candidate at the National University of Arts in Bucharest, she focuses her research on the delicate interplay between museum strategies, institutional theory, visual studies and curatorial practices.

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