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producing the other works of his exhibition colleagues. There was
therefore a confusion among the visitants, the auctoriality being
humorously confiscated by media manipulation. Returning to Comøa,
his project is a bit more personal, it is about the loss of identity and
not its appropriation, rather about uncertainty and affinity than
about confiscation. The “fake” paintings are cut and inserted in
a sort of wooden geometrical structures resembling to some giant
insectariums. It is a brave attempt of self-reflection from outside,
and not from inside the medium of painting, in an attempt to put
to the issue the generational context of his work as well.
In Maja Borg’s personal exhibition Construction Work: The Pornography
of World Peace, the Swedish artist presents the 5 minutes film
On Your Back Woman! (by Wolf Madame), where she images knockdowns
between five protagonists, in a thumping-battle that has no
rules, the winner being she who succeeds in immobilizing her adversary
on the mat for 10 seconds. The scenes happen in a bedroom, on
a bed with a sort of personal-intimate “altar” at its end, combining
the registers of the erotic and the religious. Maja Borg succeeds in
obtaining something completely opposed to the shows with women
fighting in the mud, using apparently the same means (including the
speculation of the masculine voyeurist fantasms about lesbian love),
the result consisting in some absurd and equally tender gestures.
Being included in the anthology Dirty Diaries – 12 shorts of feminist
porn, a project of Swedish director Mia Engberg, Maja Borg’s film
has as author an invented character with the stage name Wolf
Madame. The anthology is accompanied by a manifest in 10 points
which establishes “the agenda” of this genre of porn, the feminist
one, and militates for the creation of an alternative to the mainstream
industry, reckoned as sexist because it is the product of a
patriarchal capitalism.
Also at Sabot, people were able to watch the video Numerabilis of
Italian artist Valentina Miorandi, where, over the scene of a Catholic
liturgy (the image is bleary, being taken from distance, because she
wasn’t allowed to film during the service), she superposes the sound
of a cash desk, recorded in a supermarket. By synchronizing the
image and the sound band, when the priest puts the wafer in the
mouth of each believer, the cash desk records, accounting ironically
the sold deliverance. For us, as members of a majoritarily Orthodox
society whose state, perhaps in order to mark additionally its separation
towards the church, has renounced by law to the taxing of important
amounts of money claimed by the clergy for the given services,
the irony generated by this work cannot be but the more luscious.
Navid Nuur
View from the exhibition Phantom Fuel, 2010, photo: Cibinus, courtesy: Plan B, photo: Øerban Bonciocat
Plan B started in 2005, on Mihai Pop and Adrian Ghenie’s initiative,
as an artist run space, transforming itself before long in a gallery
with commercial profile, and from 2008 it also openend an extension
in Berlin. In May 2010, it enjoys Navid Nuur as guest in Cluj, an Iranian-born
Dutch artist, with the exhibition Phantom Fuel. Navid Nuur
fabricates a hybrid luminous object, made of a traditional bulb, with
metal filament, where he introduces neon, kind of ruffling the natural
process of things. It is interesting how he makes use of the local
context; he does not necessairly pounce on the reminiscences of history
(of the factory, of communism, etc., which are eventually very
tempting), but only applies his concept, making use of the current
and local possibilities, and acknowledging that in the Netherlands
he couldn’t have made this bricolage, due to the rigid restrictions of
the technical security rules. In the other room, in a someway
opposite corner, he exhibits a neon tube, whereto he confiscates its
light, painting it in mate black completely. Likewise, he is searching
for objects that do not have a specific function, for instance what the
newsmen use as load, so that the sheets from the pile do not fly
away. These quotidian objects, that you neglect (a stone or lump of
lead molten at the bottom of a glass), through their quasi-esoteric
“professionalization”, through the fact that someone gives them a
function, transforms them into discreet tools, acquire another value.
It seems to me that Nuur makes here a direct analogy with the artis-
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