Sculpture Happens
ISBN: 978-973-50-7456-2, Humanitas, 2022
Bucharest is full of sculptures, installations and compositions of a rare artistic quality, but none of these thousands of accidental works of art are signed by notable representatives of contemporary art. They have not been planned or commissioned; nor judged or budgeted for.
They are artistic accidents with a single common author — the people of Bucharest. They reflect the condition of a patchy city with many layers of asphalt. A city where no curbs or pipes are the same, vertical pedestrian markings are painted over horizontal ones, electrical cable tubes stick out of the ground, and where the maintenance work is never finished.
I took the first photo on April 18, 2014 and the last on December 1, 2021.
Project 1990. Art in Public Space Programme 2010-2014
Works by Andrei Ciubotaru, Mihai Balko, Bogdan Raţa, Ileana Oancea, Virgil Scripcariu, Aurel Tar or Mihai Zgondoiu. Each project included in the volume is photographically documented and is accompanied by a text by Magda Cârneci, Luiza Vasiliu, Cristian Neagoe, Vlad Ursulean, Dan Perjovschi, Cosmin Năsui or Dan Popescu.
The preface of the volume is signed by Marilena Preda Sânc.
“a+b”, by Ana Bănică, Selection and texts by Ioana Ciocan
Vellant, 2016
Reproductions of Ana Banică’s drawings from the “Two: Ana Banică” exhibition at the National Museum of Contemporary Art (October 15 – November 15, 2015), curator Ioana Ciocan, part of “From love. Moral facts” project.
Transformation. Romanian Sculpture 25 Years After the Revolution
ISBN: 6068642097, 9786068642093, Vellant, 2014
The Romanian Revolution of 1989 took the dictator by surprise. On December 21st 1989, masses had gathered in front of the Central Committee building in Bucharest where Ceaușescu was holding a speech condemning the uprising in Timișoara. As it turned out it was the last time the dictator addressed the people – the crowd started to boo him. One can hear his dismay, and that of his wife Elena, in The Last Speech by Andreea Dobrin; he is in shock, he cannot believe that the country no longer worships him – especially since he had managed to establish a powerful following that had idolized him for almost three decades. The couple fleeing in the Dauphin helicopter while the thousands of people are shouting “Down with Ceaușescu!” on December 21st 1989; it represents the crucial moment when the power shifted from Ceaușescu to the people: the moment of change. Elena and Nicolae Ceaușescu were executed on December 25th after a brief and questionable trial. The books, magazines and newspapers published during Ceaușescu’s regime used to mention how his self-fashioned Golden Age would last millennia. What was actually left were orphans, a population ruled by fear, whose freedom of speech had been drastically curtailed, a national history written especially for and by the Party and megalomaniac constructions.
The Golden Age exists no more.