| I see my work as a process of a constant production of the self. I work with different levels of my identity: nationality, gender, age, education, as I would with tools or instruments. I try to use and adapt them, continuously questioning their predetermined limits and possibilities. These often become categories, labels in which I am fitted. They need constant suspicion, questioning so that power mechanisms are interrogated, weakened. The visual becomes a field in which I try to identify genealogies of gaze and this is why I shift between medias.Through the gaze I keep returning to the body and the dimensions of its physicality. My own becomes a tool and subject in my performances…. |  |
Veda Popovici
I see my work as a process of a constant production of the self. I work with different levels of my identity: nationality, gender, age, education, as I would with tools or instruments. I try to use and adapt them, continuously questioning their predetermined limits and possibilities. These often become categories, labels in which I am fitted. They need constant suspicion, questioning so that power mechanisms are interrogated, weakened.
The visual becomes a field in which I try to identify genealogies of gaze and this is why I shift between medias. Through the gaze I keep returning to the body and the dimensions of its physicality. My own becomes a tool and subject in my performances, and drawing and painting become methods of exploring a sensuality of image-making. The visual is for me linked with pleasure, and the pieces I produce are about pleasure; its genealogies, its objects and representations. Ultimately images I produce relate to my own pleasure, its determinacy, its lack or suppression.
History is heavy. It acts through censorship, putting limits to freedom, installing ideologies to pleasure and reshaping desire through restraint. I obsessively return to my own history rethinking and resetting it. The latest project I work at is called The Blind Museum. This piece involves the display of several bandaged paintings. They are censored objects that keep the gaze restricted, limited, with little to see. Pleasure is here restrained and the bodies of these objects are trapped inside the history of forced meanings and aesthetics of modern art. They deal with tradition through suppression.
I search for the articulation of negativities like censorship, determinacy, fear, or restraint, bearing in mind the continuous molding of my own pleasure and desire.
Whether it is through artistic practice, curatorship, or critical writing my interventions are firstly a work on myself. The tension between concept and physicality drives me in this process of non-repeating self-reproduction.
