After How to Disappear (2019), Gaep presents Source, Raluca Popa’s second solo exhibition in the gallery space.
The artistic event, curated by Mihaela Chiriac, proposes a selection of recent and older works, now exhibited for the first time including: drawings through binoculars, photographs with interventions transferred onto the slide and an object based on an optical camouflage system.
The opening of the Source exhibition takes place on Friday, June 9, between 6-9 p.m, at the Gaep gallery, on 50 Plantelor street.
The exhibition, held on both floors of the gallery, reflects some of Raluca Popa’s concerns, such as the mediated gaze, notions related to visibility and legibility. For example, the exhibition includes a work built on the Rochester Cloak prototype – an optical camouflage system consisting of four lenses of different sizes placed at a certain distance, so that an object placed at a specific point between the two central lenses appears to disappear in a “magical” way.
Viewers are invited to position themselves at a certain point in the exhibition space and observe the disappearance of a fragment from the volume of poetry Love Songs, by Seda Mimaroğlu.
The mediated gaze is also found in Binocular Drawings, a series of landscapes drawn in charcoal, en plein air. “Viewed through binoculars, the natural landscape is exemplified in five variations of vertical and horizontal forms that result from the eye-mind-hand dynamic”, explains Mihaela Chiriac, the curator of the exhibition.
Among the works in the exhibition is History, a slide show of 80 photographs of the artificial Teufelsberg hill in Berlin, taken from roughly the same panoramic angle over the course of four years. On some photos, the artist intervened by hand painting trees like those in Cézanne’s paintings.
Such a gesture of appropriation indicates a fundamental act in Raluca Popa’s practice: that of rereading and rewriting. “I see my works as a collection of phrases and short stories,” she says in her artist statement. “I often work with already existing material. I like to think that my references, such as an image, written text, moving images or personal archive, have an implicit documentary quality, embodying a truth beyond their subjective appearance and motivation. Sometimes this primary aspect is not at hand, if I am working, for example, with the title of a book or with a personal archive of school papers. I am working to acknowledge this aspect, for clarification. Then, I continue by reassembling the material into expressive forms that are sent back into the public sphere.”
Starting from this artist statement and relying on literary theory writings about (re)reading and authorship, Mihaela Chiriac interprets Raluca Popa’s works as a text – in this case, a metaphor for (re)reading. “Popa collects materials – images, ideas, texts, her own or from others – and weaves them into new forms and configurations. Even her own works can be such materials, until she decides how to reuse them, reread them, rewrite them”, says the curator of the exhibition.
The exhibition can be visited until July 29, 2023. Admission is free.
RALUCA POPA (b. 1979) graduated in Fine Arts at Byam Shaw, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London (2011), after she studied at the University of Art and Design in Cluj-Napoca (2003).
Recent exhibitions include: Time Lines (online exhibition, gaepgallery.com, 2022), 22 Women Artists (Stations, Berlin, 2022), Goodbye, Sarotti! (Soft Power Project Space, Berlin, 2021), Abecedar 2012 (Ultima Arhivă & Tranzit Bucharest, 2020), Viral Self-Portraits (online exhibition, MG+MSUM, Ljubljana, 2020), How to Disappear (personal exhibition, Gaep, Bucharest , 2019), Artistic Inquiries into Plants (Tranzit Bucharest, 2019) and The Unknown Portrait of Brancusi (personal exhibition, Europe House, London, 2016).
She participated twice in the Sinopal art biennials (Sinop, 2022 and 2017) and Art Encounters (Timișoara, 2019 and 2017).
Lives and works in Berlin.
MIHAELA CHIRIAC (b. 1984, Brașov) is a curator and writes about art. She is the co-founder of the STATIONS exhibition space in Berlin-Kreuzberg.
Cover photo: Raluca Popa, History, 2023, 80 digital photos printed on photographic paper, interventions with acrylic, transferred to slide; photo: Raluca Popa. Courtesy of the artist and Gaep Gallery.
