Miki Velciov’s solo show With the Eyes of My Mind, curated by Horațiu Lipot, is on display at La Cave, an exhibition space coordinated by the French Institute in Cluj-Napoca (Str. Ion I. C. Brătianu 22).
“At a time when artistic practices are guided more and more by market pressures or by the institutional agenda of the limited partner disguised as a public benefit, Miki Velciov is an author who follows a unique path, managing to evade the tyranny of the product-gallery object , in favor of a personal and sustained research that manifests in/and is about sub-perceptible spatial and cognitive structures, about how they intertwine, manipulating or authoritatively guiding our perception. […]So, “With my mind’s eye” is a rather concrete proposal, a typology and a method of observing the external, compared to how some of us might have thought that it would be a new age reference, type para -, pishe -“ Horațiu Lipot, curator.
Miki Velciov (b. 1968) lives and works in Timișoara. He works on the interference between painting, object, installation, video and land art. Velchiov began by studying the primordial elements of nature, such as earth, water, air, and fire, making a veritable x-ray of the hidden layers of reality that reveal the danger of the life of so-called meaningless creatures such as insects or plants. But, more than that, he intended to go beyond the purely material dimension of the earth, approaching it through the prism of contemporary socio-political aspects (One Cubic Meter of Life, 2015). Installations such as Uprooting (2013) or In Terra Pax (2016) reveal a loss of balance between man and nature through the overexploitation of resources, hence the phenomenon of migration.
Starting with Big Brother (2014) and the Oculus series, Velciov became interested in the pervasiveness of surveillance and excessive control practiced in totalitarian societies. The artist became known for his privileged installations, which reveal, through various forms of spatial restriction, the illusion of absolute control and the impossibility of the utopian perfection of these systems (Shock Wave, 2016; Triandră, 2019).
The exhibition can be visited untill June 21, 2024.
Cover photo: INTERSECTARE, Miki Velciov 2024
