2/3 Gallery in Bucharest opened the exhibition “Blind Spot” by artist Vladimir Florentin, curated by Felicity Hammond.
“In the condition of non-confrontation, when you have nothing on which to act tangibly, there is still one thing you can do: act on that condition. Act to change the conditions in which you wait.”
— Brian Massumi, Ontopower: War, Powers, and the State of Perception (Duke University Press, 2015)
The exhibition “Blind Spot”, a large-scale multimedia installation by Romanian-born, London-based artist Vladimir Florentin, curated by Felicity Hammond, explores the technologically charged space of non-confrontation – a conceptual territory that reveals how technology reshapes the logic of contemporary war and conflict.
“Blind Spot” holds up a mirror to the invisible processes that define violence today: sophisticated technological networks operating both in times of action and waiting. Visitors navigate a hallucinatory environment of familiar yet distorted symbols – calibration markers, maps, diagrams – that become the backdrop for sculptural interventions imagining what might happen if the operational violence of capitalism were disrupted.
At the heart of the installation stands a steel aircraft, part drone, part paper-plane, crashed into the very graphic markers it depends upon. The image misbehaves and makes the aircraft fail – embodying both the childlike dream of flight and the crashing reality of technological systems. As Paul Virilio reminds us, every new technology also invents its own accident.
Florentin does not overlook human presence: a sculptural portrait of a figure that resists the machine while also appearing designed for machinic readability questions the limits of machine vision, systematic errors, and tactics of intentional invisibility. In these blind spots of algorithmic perception, the artist points to strategies of resisting extractive data capitalism.
Typography and sound are crucial elements: letters turned into optical noise, surveillance-resistant typefaces, synthetic voices tuned to evade speech recognition, and fragmented field recordings construct a broken score that draws attention to the failures and resistances of contemporary surveillance systems.” Felicity Hammond
Vladimir Florentin, a Romanian-born artist based in London, co-founded the Displaced Materials Lab (DML), specializing in expanded photography. His practice spans sculptural photography and the study of human inhabitation. A 2021 graduate with honors from the University of Westminster, his exploration of gentrification in Hackney Wick has shaped his unique approach to art and community engagement. He has led seminars at Westminster University and Kingston University, and participated in a site-specific workshop led by Brad Feuerhelm and Jack Whitefield in Arles, France.
Florentin’s work has been featured in international exhibitions including the Unseen Photo Fair (Amsterdam), Expanded Specialities (Galeria 2/3, Bucharest), AMP Gallery (London), ABBF at Peckham 24, Lunigiana Land Art (Italy), and Ambika P3 Gallery. His work has been published in Tied to Light Collective Vol. 2, Romanian Contemporary Photography INFLUX, Kinda Weird Magazine, L’Œil de la Photographie, and Home Alone: A Survival Guide by Max Siedentopf.
This cultural project is co-financed by the Administration of the National Cultural Fund (AFCN).
