KANTUTA QUIROS & ALIOCHA IMHOff - Overlapping Biennial

Alexandra Croitoru’s works present us
with an insidious portrait of power - a
pseudo-figure, a face hidden behind
a mask knit in the national colors of a
country in which swans and public order
have been in some way jeopardized,
transforming any subsequent touristic
endeavor, however innocent, into psychological
warfare. Thus sheltered, power
divides the world into advanced nations
and belated nations, discerning the adversary
by several schematic traits. What
we see is the outcome of this rudimentary
sociology: an impoverished portrait,
another mask woven from stereotypes
and vulgar hypotheses, the fixed image
of the traveler dragging behind himself a
culpable origin.
Power seems effective, untroubled,
confirmed in its aims, of which the most
important is that of communicating itself.
Where we had expected stratagems and
perfidious avatars, we encounter situations
in which the code works perfectly
and transparently. Alexandra makes use
of no metaphors and this, I think, is where
the strength of the images lies - she
assembles a stage on which the relation
of forces is presented ‘in the nude’,
removed from the field of tacit complicity
and consequently baffled. Either on sunny
beaches or in front of tourist landmarks,
the ‘object’ of power is monitored from
a travel-size Panopticon. It conforms to
and even anticipates the desires of this
gaze, embracing the local dress code and
a standard tourist behavior, yet it cannot
rid itself of the origin that transforms any
promenade into a tiny and picturesque
Golgotha. The holiday photos play on that
mode of irony that simulates seduction:
taking the interlocutor seriously, being
swept of one’s feet, approving in excess,
amplifying the other’s ideas and drawing
disproportionate conclusions from them.
Irony dashes forward, extrapolates in all
directions, undergoes a fit of exclusively
lateral thinking and loses the idea, abandons
it deflated and forlorn. Desolate, but
somewhat closer to the real significance
- a ski mask in the national colors bought
from the store of the football team Steaua.
Mihnea Mircan, 2004
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