Raluca Popa
artist in residence September 2018, Romania /
Statement
Diary 1990 and Archive of School Test Papers 1992-1998, Reconsidered
During the residency I plan to work with two different archives I have amassed beginning with the year 1990. One archive contains a diary I kept during my very first trip abroad in the summer of 1990, in Austria. The other archive comprises hundreds of personal school test papers collected between the years 1992 and 1998, during my secondary school and college years.
The choice to bring together materials related on the one hand to moving through various geographies and processes of learning on the other hand, stems in part from the need to understand the implications and consequences established systems within certain spatial and temporal limits had and continue to have, as underlying structures, upon my development and that of my generation.
Biography
Raluca Popa was born in 1979, in Romania. She studied at Byam Shaw School of Art - Central Saint Martins, London and at The University of Art and Design, Cluj. She lives and works in Bucharest.
Ever since completing her studies she has been maintaining an interest in the concept of learning and methods of dissemination of knowledge, upon which she reflects through drawing, performance, video, animation, books. In her work she assumes a condition prior to learning and understanding, or posthumous stances of forgetting, undoing and unlearning, and from within these marginal positions she creates new sentences, or she updates the meaning of existing material such as written texts, moving pictures, photographic archives. For example the act of learning to swim takes the form of a performance at the Black Sea during Sinopale 6, International Sinop Biennial, Turkey, 2017.
For the past ten years she has been working also in animation films, mainly as background artist. Thus, shifting between the affirming nature of an artwork and the subordinate nature of a décor, she feels that she is looking forward and backward at the same time.
Recent solo / group exhibitions:
The Unpleasant Show, Jecza Gallery, Timișoara, 2018; Life a userʼs manual, Art Encounters, Timișoara. 2017; Sinopale 6, International Sinop Biennial, Turkey, 2017; The Best of Bees, Duplex, Geneva (CH), 2017; South by Southeast. A Further Surface, Guangdong Times Museum (CN), 2016; Critical Moments, Shed im Eisenwerk, Frauenfeld (CH), 2016; Esthetics of Learning, Printmaking Gallery, The University of the Arts in Philadelphia (US), 2016; Two Titles, Rumänska Kulturinstitutet, Stockholm (SE), solo show, 2015; Turning Something Plain into a Circle, Ivan Gallery, Bucharest (RO), solo show, 2015; Mapping Bucharest: Art, Memory, and Revolution 1916–2016, Vienna Biennale (AU), 2015; Une autre cité, Tranzit Bucharest (RO), 2015; Other Rooms, Galeria Plan B, Cluj, 2015; And Yet There Was Art!, Leopold Museum, Vienna (AU), 2014
External Links
www.ralucapopa.ro