Muzeul National de Arta Contemporanea

IRINA BOTEA BUCAN
Apostrophe. Everything started with the keeper’s hesitation
Chapter VI of The White Dot and The Black Cube, an exhibition project in six parts
19 January – 14 May 2017

An exhibition conceived and curated by Anca Verona Mihuleţ
Curatorial input: Diana Marincu


Irina Botea Bucan’s personal exhibition is the final chapter of the six-part curatorial project The White Dot and The Black Cube developed between November 2015 and March 2017. The exhibition was constructed in several stages, starting in 2014, and came to revolve around three nuclei – a series of six films featuring secondary, suspended histories mostly unknown to the general public; a selection of films focusing on gestures and behavioral fragments; and a third direction, presenting two personal stories marked by the antagonism of private vs public and shown at the Dalles Hall in such a way as to make them visible from the street.

The 16 mm tape, the attention devoted to sound, the historical references to the films of Jean Painlevé or Jean-Luc Godard induce a profoundness of communication between the artist, the individuals she films, and the subject matters she follows, captured at the borderline between vulnerability and initiative or passivity and reaction. The process of identification between the viewer and the observed subject is not being imposed, but rather carefully modulated by the loops of the narrative thread, while the choice that the public has to make oscillates, in its turn, between empathy and distance, between transfer and exclusion.

As a punctuation mark, the apostrophe always signals a reversion, a turning from direct address toward a third entity, absent, but essential, that is being necessarily invoked in the dual relationship between the reader and the listener. The title acts as an exemplary cut-out, as a unique moment extracted from the logic of the narrative and the sequential construction of cognition, conferring an acceptable, fluid and open form to the subject-object relationship.

In Art Historians (2014), Irina Botea Bucan invited two art historians from the Brukenthal Museum in Sibiu to talk about the way in which they work with the collection, about their favourite works, their vision and their relationship with the museum. The emphasis is on the characters’ gestures, on their emotion and the type of discourse. In Impersonations (2014), the artist follows the preparations for the reenactment of the Lincoln assassination, filming the discussions between the actors, the rehearsals, the dilemmatic or humorous instances, while at the same time keeping her presence behind the camera unnoticeable.

Irina Botea Bucan’s most recent films, Ferenc Bar (2016) and Rock. Paper. Skin (2017) were produced in collaboration with Jon Dean and filmed in 2016 in Budapest. The son of the famous Hungarian soccer player Ferenc Deák had opened a bar dedicated to the memory of his father, but the dialogue with the owner and the regular customers shows that the place represented much more than that.

In the video Rock. Paper. Skin, two young curators interested in the experimental unearth several parallel stories from the storage of the Hungarian Museum of Natural History and read, interpret and analyse them using the instruments of the collective imaginary.

Behind the scenes of this presentation, questions are raised about the integration of reality into art and the way in which the central characters of a video, recorded in their natural surroundings, cope with their filmic existence. Where lie the boundaries in revealing an identity, and what is the filmmaker’s responsibility toward the subject of the gaze?
In the past 20 years, Irina Botea Bucan has been using multiple media to inspect topical socio-political dominants and centralise the agency of the human factor. Irina Botea Bucan’s artistic methodology combines reenactment strategies with simulated auditions and elements borrowed from of direct cinema and cinéma vérité. She develops her projects by drawing on her collaboration with the performers, who become an integral part of the entire process of preparation; at the same time, as a filmmaker, her role is in a continuous flux, as she transitions from the position of the observer to that of a reflexive, participative and performative module.

After graduating from the Art University in Bucharest, the artist earned her Master’s degree from The School of the Art Institute in Chicago. In 2015, her personal exhibition “It is now a matter of learning hope” was selected (together with eight other exhibitions) by the International Association of Art Critics in the US for the best exhibition format. In 2014, Irina received the 3Arts award, conferred to female artists for exceptional professional activity.

Irina Botea Bucan lives in Bucharest, Birmingham and London. Her works were exhibited at: New Museum, New York; MUSAC – Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilia y León, Spain; Centre Pompidou, Paris; National Gallery Jeu de Paume, Paris; Kunsthalle Winterthur, Switzerland; Reina Sofia National Museum, Madrid; U-Turn Quadriennal, Copenhagen; Kunstforum, Vienna; Foksal Gallery, Warsaw; Argos Center for Art and Media, Brussels; MNAC – National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest; National Museum of Contemporary Art, Szczecin, Poland; Center for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw; the Venice Biennale; the Gwangju Biennale, South Korea; the Prague Biennale. She participated in several film festivals: the Artefact Festival, Leuven; the International Film Festival in Rotterdam; Impakt Panorama, Utrecht; the Polis Adriatic European Festival.