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Ion Grigorescu

Performing History (Canapé Demonstration)
09.28.12 - 10.21.12
Exhibition — BBB centre d'art

Ion Grigorescu
Performing History (Canapé Demonstration), video projection (2011)
Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Gregor Podnar, Berlin/ Ljubljana

Photo : Nicolas Brasseur, Le Printemps de Septembre 2012

Born 1945, he lives and works in Bucarest.  

 

Ion Grigorescu is one of the most emblematic figures in Romanian art today, but his reputation also took a long time to cross national frontiers. Active since the early 1970s, he produced most of his work under the totalitarian regime of Ceausescu, during which he played an important role in the resistance embodied by an independent, underground art scene. The body and politics are the twin themes of his multidisciplinary work, whether in the past communist period or in the present era of triumphant capitalism. His favoured media are photography and photographic collages, 8mm film and performance (which he records). Created in the secrecy of his studio apartment, his works were long known only to a handful of people and did not reach a wider, international audience until the 1990s, after the fall of the dictator.


At the BBB centre d'art, his work Performing History (Canapé Demonstration) shows images of a national holiday under the dictatorship, when citizens were forced to take part in order to prove their loyalty to the regime. This video projected onto a sofa is a pretext for inviting us to imagine a person lying there, physically at once with their own history. Speaking of his work, Grigorescu has said that “When I was 45 I had to get beyond the feeling that the scene was now dominated by a younger generation of artists in order to make up my mind to talk about this past lived under a totalitarian regime. In doing so, I realised that works about the past were in fact very contemporary.”