Stefan Sava – Ruins of a Day

18.02.2015 – 24.04.2015

Using the theme of the ruin as a starting point, the exhibition presents four new artworks/installations by Ştefan Sava and traces the contour of a mental space for which the found, appropriated image is central. Regarded as the dynamic and omnipresent coordinates of contemporaneity – in relation to memory and to the architectural as well as ideological constructions of the present – the ruins become atomized through artistic gesture and are provided with multiple meanings acquired through a montage of images. The themes of war and destruction, observed from a distance, are perceived as being as important as the action of erecting “monuments”: any such gesture conjures the perspective of horizontality and imbalance.

In one of Sava’s artistic interventions the act of seeing is directed specifically to an archive comprising women portraits, photographed in Hamburg immediately after WWII, in 1945-1946. These items are recycled from an underground flux of images of the past. Another installation presents the viewer with an abstractized view of a modernity in ruins, supervised closely and mapped through an archive composed of aerial photographs taken in times of war – “de-classified” documents. What can be discerned through perception inevitably leads to the impasse of our positioning as spectators.

Special thanks:  Vlad Basalici, Claudiu Cobilanschi, Monica Neguțescu.

Ivan Gallery, Bucharest, 2015