In the old Bucharest of multi-ethnic merchants and fish wives, at the Artexpert Gallery, the French-Romanian artist Alexandru Popovici holds a small-circuit commemoration, without candles or Koliva, to mark the 128 years which elapsed since Karl Marx’s death, HotNews reports.
Objects which were entirely banal during the communist age are invested with a new life, they are given names and a different identity, at odds with their concrete, industrial, use. They are freed both from the imposed communist uniformity and from today’s desired socialist-capitalist typification. Replica lathe operator’s chairs from Sibiu, the political capsule with matchbox-individuals, shell-sculptures which contain our repressed dreams, cubic dreams, speak, in their own way, about Marx’s posterity and about the relics of the noble ideals of socialism: liberty, equality, diversity, solidarity. Are they dangerous for today’s Romanian society?
While speaking about the exhibition, Alexandru Popovici: “I cannot, I will not, I don’t know how to give a lecture on Marxism, although I was born and brought up in Paris, in a family of true-blood Romanian communists. I am an architect, I am not an ideologist or a historian of ideas. However, you cannot speak of the intellectual and artistic history of the past century and ignore Marx. You simply cannot. Art, just like democracy, in fact, feeds on that past which should not be forgotten, but recovered, by contrast, and recycled.”
Alexandru Popovici (31) obtained his DPLG architect degree from the Ecole nationale superieure d’architecture Paris Malaquais in 2007. At present he coordinates projects concerned with the memory and symbolism of artefacts, he was employed as a collaborating architect at Space Syntax Romania, after working at Stefan Firimita as an interior architect, a period during which he did interior design for MADAME. While in Paris, he designed plans and lay-outs for a housing building, for Agence Galiano-Simon-Teno (2004-2005). In 2003, he worked for OKon Architects, in Pusan, South Korea.
Address: 14 A Armeneasca St., 7.30 pm
