Using the theme of the ruin as a starting point, the exhibition presents four new artworks/installations by Ştefan Sava and traces the contour of a mental space for which the found, appropriated image is central. Regarded as the dynamic and omnipresent coordinates of contemporaneity – in relation to memory and to the architectural as well as ideological constructions of the present – the ruins become atomized through artistic gesture and are provided with multiple meanings acquired through a montage of images. The themes of war and destruction, observed from a distance, are perceived as being as important as the action of erecting “monuments”: any such gesture conjures the perspective of horizontality and imbalance.

In one of Sava’s artistic interventions the act of seeing is directed specifically to an archive comprising women portraits, photographed in Hamburg immediately after WWII, in 1945-1946. These items are recycled from an underground flux of images of the past. Another installation presents the viewer with an abstractized view of a modernity in ruins, supervised closely and mapped through an archive composed of aerial photographs taken in times of war – “de-classified” documents. What can be discerned through perception inevitably leads to the impasse of our positioning as spectators.
 
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Ștefan Sava (n. 1982) lives and works in Bucharest. His projects combine photography, video, performance and object and are based on a long process of theoretical reflection and research. He is particularly interested in the subject of recent history and in the way in which the history can be visually reactivated through an analytical approach. His works aim to intimately connect the viewer with the dialectical relationship between past and present.

Works by Ștefan Sava in future exhibitions: February 2015 – Few Were Happy with their Condition, Kunsthalle Winterthur, Winterthur (CH), curator Olga Ștefan; May 2015 – Inventing the Truth, Venice Biennale, The New Gallery of Romanian Institute of Culture and Humanities Research in Venice (IT), curator Diana Marincu.
 
Special thanks: Vlad Basalici, Claudiu Cobilanschi, Monica Neguțescu.
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