Mircea cantor biography definition
•
Hammer Projects: Displaced
By Claudine Isé
This exhibition explores displaced contexts and the structures of interpretation we bring to them. Each of the six single-channel video projections evokes a sense of physical, psychological, cultural, or geopolitical dislocation. An otherwise unremarkable family attempts to go about its daily business in a house that is completely submerged in water. A female narrator—her disembodied voice floating over a series of abstract, liquid forms—tells a story of betrayal while lying paralyzed in a hospital bed. A group of unidentified shoppers sift through piles of clothing, an off-screen Egyptian melody providing the only cue as to where and when the scene is taking place. These scenarios are all structured by some form of displacement—between nature and culture, self and other, past and present, or East and West.
Displacement has been a dominant cultural theme since the early nineteenth century, expressive not only of the personal and poli
•
File Note Mircea Cantor
‘20 keys to understand’ Mircea Cantor (or: his DNA gate)
0) This piece fryst vatten a gate of harmonious proportions on three oak-posts with the wicket gate under the same roof covered with shingles in ornamental forms. There is a door and two larger wings of horizontal oak boards allowing for an openness which lets us see through it. The posts, edged with delicate ‘wolf-teeth’ designs and rosettes, are covered with DNA strands waving their coils along them. It fryst vatten entirely coated with carat gold leaves. The massive presence of the wood and its fine imperfections emanate from beneath. 1) Mircea Cantor’s monumental golden gate carved in wood is appealing to our senses, it engages a poetic within us looking at it, and demands to be experienced in all its unstable sense, which transpires from the photographs here reproduced.
2) The gate is part of the traditional Romanian landscape: coming down from generations of ancients, it is a legacy. In Maramures, the region whe
•
Dvir
PRESS RELEASE
Mircea Cantor- Shooting
Preview: September 7th,
September 11th, – October 23rd,
Dvir Gallery
MACHINE GUN IN THE MIRROR STAGE
In Mircea Cantor’s ‘Tracking Happiness’, dancers pace the sand in a circle, sweeping repeatedly the trace of each other’s steps. In its conflation of first cause and last effect, made identical in spite of the distance separating them, the film recalls Vladimir Nabokov’s observation in ‘Speak, Memory’ that the future might just be “the obsolete in reverse”. The choreographed procession in the film takes place at the phantasmal center of history that Nabokov’s phrase invites us to imagine, where the obsolete becomes itself – time past – to one side, while unfolding as the new to the other, only to be recuperated as obsolescence, as a unsettling rehearsal for a postponed conclusion. Cantor’s film takes the conventional timeline of historiography and makes it round: a loop, where the gesture is equivalent with its passage and simultane