Chronophobia
Seeing Time, Kunsthalle Bega 2019, Timișoara, curator Liviana Dan,
“The environment /installation CHRONOPHOBIA was initially produced for the exhibition Seeing Time, curated at the Kunstahalle Bega Timisoara by Liviana Dan. The installation comprises of a mirrored room with a natural grass floor, with two video films on monitors. The viewing of the first video, placed on the ceiling, requires lying down on the grass. It presents places from the artists’ childhood village: buildings, streets, gardens and surrounding fields, filmed from alternate perspectives – frontal or from very high up. The fast succession of the images retraces familiar trajectories in a rhythm dictated by the melodic line of a religious, instrumental call for prayer. The second video, placed outside of the mirrored room, buried in the grass in a way that also calls for lying down, this time in order to look down, is a series of interviews on the subject of the passing of time and the anxiety it provokes. The subjects, all familiar to the artist, express their anxiety and feelings of helplessness, in spontaneous monologues. The fear of time and its passage means more, for the artist and most of the people interviewed, than the fear of simply growing old. It translates as the fear – often doubled by mourning – of change and loss of people, places and contexts. In Andreea Medar’s case, the fear is for the loss of an entire system of traditions, values, and spaces – the rural community of her family. Her personal history, that extends over the entire system of places from her childhood, over the history of her entire family, translates, in her artistic practice, as a constant appropriation of images, portraits, family documents, objects unearthed from drawers and attics, stories and memories in an attempt to oppose the passing of time by preservation. Images that hold meaning for her only are recreated as installation spaces, brought into the gallery as layers of earth or grass, or draw coded lines of letters from symbolic materials. CHRONOPHOBIA does not speak of the fear of passing time from the point of view of someone attempting to extend or freeze the present, or from the point of view of the historian who tries to evoke the past, but rather from the standpoint of someone who has the capacity of bringing the past – long or just gone – back into a now where it can still be operative, relevant beyond meaningful and operational beyond inspirational.” (Malina Ionescu)
Kunsthalle Bega, Chronophobia 2019, mirror room, lawn, projection, display