Ivan Gallery has the pleasure to invite you on Wednesday, 30th of March, 7pm, at an event dedicated to the most recent video project by the artist Ștefan Sava. At its first Romanian screening, The Falling of the Arches has been produced in 2015 on the occasion of the exhibition Inventing the Truth. On Fiction and Reality, at The New Gallery of the Romanian Institute for Culture and Research in Humanities in Venice, part of the 56th Venice Biennale, curated by Diana Marincu.
 
In the video The Falling of the Arches Ștefan Sava stages an art history lecture in which he interprets an archive of images with anonymous photographs, mostly from inter and postwar Germany. The research of this body of images with methodologies specific to the discipline of art history – especially those developed by Georges Didi-Huberman in his studies of theory and philosophy of images – the artist exposes the differences between seeing and looking, between perception and a sheer “archeology of the image”. His approach extends the view on some apparently plain frames – of these vernacular photographs, with portraits or interiors – while at the same time focusing on the personalised methods entailed by working with an archive. This essentially theoretical inquiry, that raises issues referring to the indexicality of the photographic image, or to the art history’s desire and effort of solving an image doesn’t turn away the attention from the historical nature and significance of the photographs in themselves, with details in which one can decipher the signs and marks of the Nazi era and its intrusion and infiltration in the everyday life of some common people.
 
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Ștefan Sava (1982, Slobozia) holds an MA from the Photo-Video Department, UNARTE Bucharest where he is currently enrolled as a PHD student. 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. Among his recent exhibitions are: in 2016 Ongoing h/Histories, Studio Gallery, Budapest, and in 2015 Mapping Bucharest: Art, Memory, and Revolution 1916-2016, Vienna Biennale, MAK Vienna, Inventing the Truth, Venice Biennale, The New Gallery of Romanian Institute of Culture and Humanities Research in Venice, Few Were Happy with their Condition, Kunsthalle Winterthur and the solo show Ruins of a Day, Ivan Gallery, Bucharest. In April-May 2016 Ștefan will have a solo show inside Riga Photography Biennale, at Alma Gallery, Latvia. He lives and works in Bucharest.
 
The Falling of the Arches will be screened at the first floor of the gallery space until the 28th April 2016, Wednesday to Saturday, 11-19, Sunday and Monday by appointment.
 
Ștefan Sava, The Falling of the Arches, video HD, 30 min, 2015

Concept, text, image, sound, editing: Ștefan Sava

Camera assistant: Sorin Popescu

Translation: Alistair Ian Blyth
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