Dowry 2018
Lapsus Art Space, curator Alex Boca, Timișoara, Ro
In an autobiographical way, Medar uses her own lineage for a case study, transforming the dowry of her great grandmother into an installation. The inherited object is re-identified and recontextualized for a memory analysis. The matrimonial bed becomes a link between archaic and contemporary social practices, is reassembled as a demarcation of lost identity coordinates. The bed panes, the head and the legs, make up a grid structure containing the space between the extremes, the metaphor for the place between birth and death – a fertile and natural place of the earth and seeds (tribes). I look up, I cannot fly, I look down, I cannot enter – the last words of my great-grandmother are evidence of an existential crisis. This crisis can be transmitted through the heredity of memory as immaterial dowry in the form of primordial questions about the origin of man. Andreea Medar tries to answer those questions, and the fragments of glass are the expression of Braille abstraction. Thus, personal researches receive intangible forms that appeal to the inner abstract sense of the viewer. The theme is structure, the abstract grid promotes silence. Rosalind Krauss said the grid is a protest, a refusal of language and structuralism. It has no hierarchy, center, inflections, it is anti-referential, hostile to narrative. The grid is the barricade against language and an intrusion from the outside. It has no echo or vital signs, it has collapsed the nature’s spatiality, and it has been transferred to the cultural object. In this new silence of the grid, what many artists believe they have found, is the beginning, the origin of art. We can look at the contemporary individual in the context of the genealogical descendancy as a variant of his ancestors under the influence of the present. Thus, nation is a single perpetual individual who regenerates through birth and death, always changing, and the genetic memory and spirit is transmitted through biological heredity and ritual practice. Dowry is the inherited identity of the cyclic individual. (Alex Boca, Gabriela Ciobanu)
Dowry 2018, Lapsus, earth, plants, traditional bed that belonged to my great-grandmother, shards of glass, traditional clay pot, plaster, acacia thorns)