BIO / statement

I am an artist (b.1991), curator and art space manager from Cluj-Napoca (Ro), where I graduated my MA in painting in 2015, and co-founded MATCA artspace in 2017. Besides arts, I activate(d) in some side-projects focused on cinema/electronic music, the local audience and its pulse (Colectiva Silver Screen, Shared Sight, Temporar). Last year I co-curated Rubik, a project dedicated in offering space for art initiatives which no longer have a space where to develop their programs - most of them affected by the growth of the real estate market. Being active in the organization of an artist-run space puts me in touch with the failing structures of culture/art from Romania (and not only), where being a cultural manager and artist is sometimes an unrewarded act of resistance. I am interested in my projects in how art is defined by the place where it `happens`. 
As a curator, I am very linked to the young and emergent scene, which I sometimes try to put in dialogue with the established one. 


I am adapted to develop projects out of very few resources, and as an artist I try to see this as a starting point for my inspiration. Sometimes my experiments fail, but I see failing as an important aspect of this process. I like to experiment with a lot of mediums, from text, space interventions, video, sound, objects, sculpture, drawing – and I prefer to produce my works in site/context-specific circumstances. I usually develop my works around the matter of quotidian emptiness – which under a closer look seems to be filled with everything: memory, space, fear, anger, guilt, nothingness, decay, beauty, poetry, clichés, irony, connections, conventions, reactions (…).

My works in general are configured around the tension between pessimism and optimism, where at the border between these two I always find a lot of irony. Resilience and ways of improving social/human conditions underlie many of my works, whether the inspiration from which they derive is specific to Balkan culture, Asian philosophies or are the result of word games with multiple meanings. I often use text in my works, or there are texts or a title that fuel my inspiration, and at the same time I like to re-work and re-contextualize already existing objects, and I use "theft" demonstratively - often to boycott against the idea of originality, or at least to speculate that our sources of inspiration often derive from the mundane. 

Most of the time I like to deliver and use in my works reality as it is - messy, rough, improvised, and I tackle subjects that romanticize pessimistic situations in one way or another. I consider pessimism a healthy way to keep us realistic, and most of the time in my work I express this in a note where I amuse myself at the inevitability of things.