Mona Vatamanu & Florin Tudor
LIVING UNITS
Exhibition
MERCER UNION, 2008
Living Units comprises a multi-media installation and photographic works by Romanian artists Mona Vatamanu and Florin Tudor, presented for the first time in Canada. Vatamanu and Tudor’s practice explores the visual, emotional and political aspects of architecture, its relationship to socio-political memory and subjective experience. Growing up in a communist system, the architectural landscape represents for them a dramatic stage, layered with social and political meaning. Urban sites are documents that speak of lives and stories where the personal clashes with political ideology and state control.
The
artists create an immersive environment that emulates the oppressive monotony
of socialist habitats, integrating the viewer as part of the landscape. Images
of apartment building facades are projected onto two structures representing
stylized houses, creating an ambivalent feeling of struggle. The human scale of
these units reinforces identification, while their schematic shape—reminiscent
of early childhood drawings—makes us think beyond architectural models, to the
quintessential home. Offering a critical reconsideration of the recent past and
contemporary Romanian reality, Vatamanu and Tudor’s work reflects the
uncompromising views of a young and intransigent generation of artists,
unafraid to look back and question. Bringing focus to still controversial
histories, Living Units provides an occasion to explore the
political and ethical state of a post-communist society, its traumas,
disillusions and hopes.
Artist Info
Mona Vatamanu and Florin Tudor are Romanian artists based in Bucharest who have worked together since 2000. They represented Romania at the 2007 Venice Biennial and have exhibited widely at various institutions, including Kunstraum Kreuzberg Bethanien, Berlin (2006); Isola Art Center, Milano (2005); Exit Art Gallery, New York (2004); Play Gallery, Berlin (2004); and Ludwig Museum, Budapest (2003). They have participated in numerous international festivals, such as Festival Rencontres Internationales Paris-Berlin (2005); Cybersonica 03, ICA, London (2003); and attended artist residencies at Kunstraum Kreuzberg Bethanien, Berlin (2006); AIR Vienna (2005); USF Verftet, Bergen (2005); and Kunstlerhaus Buchsenhausen, Innsbruck (2004).
