| I combine different mediums. My work incorporates texts, photography, video and transcripts from audio-recordings, ready-mades, installations, and interventions. I like to use fictions, as well as history. I use photographs to create objects or installations and sometimes I rely on photography for documentation purposes. It became, in time, a supporting element, sometimes as the background image, providing an important communication with the viewer. The presentation texts for the projects detail the work and offer additional information or references. For Ode to joy I wrote verses from Schiller’s poem in an exclusive neighborhood developed on the outskirts of the city, a multifunctional complex containing a commercial area, a business park…. |  |
Elena Ciobanu
I combine different mediums. My work incorporates texts, photography, video and transcripts from audio-recordings, ready-mades, installations, and interventions. I like to use fictions, as well as history. I use photographs to create objects or installations and sometimes I rely on photography for documentation purposes. It became, in time, a supporting element, sometimes as the background image, providing an important communication with the viewer. The presentation texts for the projects detail the work and offer additional information or references.
For Ode to joy I wrote verses from Schiller’s poem in an exclusive neighborhood developed on the outskirts of the city, a multifunctional complex containing a commercial area, a business park and a residential area with sport facilities, medical services, schools, and churches. “The place where each of us would like to live, work and spend their spare time.” The complex is planned as a city within a city, functioning with a set of community rules and security measures that will ensure its inhabitants a “safe and healthy climate.” The project, consisting of photographs documenting the intervention and the presentation text will be included in the Bucharest Biennale this year.
Paradise, the Island, meant transforming the hallway of a block of flats in Bucharest into a virtual paradise. I covered the walls in large poster-like photographic prints displaying secluded paradise islands images. One day I picked up a fortune cookie in the hallway of an office building, the saying read, “I have a dream. Time to go to bed.” I included this phrase in the project. Also, in the text detailing the work are quoted short passages from Guy Debord and Wendy Brown’s works.
For the Superheroes project I have made light boxes with quotes from famous superheroes or villains written on images of people I photographed in Tokyo, all dressed in their work uniforms. The Japanese society is known to possess an intensive labor-oriented tradition, and the project intended to explore that issue and the mechanisms involved.
This year I will participate also in Moscow Biennale for Young Art with the projects Icarus and Sugarhouse. Both pieces were inspired by Venice’s present state and history to date, and I considered the former republic and its stories as more of a generic case. I intended to restate myths and events of the past using common, familiar objects.
