mono mihai’s installation lukewarm dissects the idea of borders, of being on the fence of different subjects and contexts. In the liminality of the vitrine space, mihai pulls together and apart three moods through three visual interpretations. The artist reflects on the status of the artist as “something” in between an outcast and an insider, but ultimately these directions have the potential to blur each other, melting in a 5-meter long and 45-cm wide glass vitrine. A fence that was saved from his grandmother’s courtyard is carefully rebuilt in the vitrine – a fence inside a protected vitrine. Thus, the fence is removed from its initial context and temporarily installed in the Mântuleasa neighborhood, where the legend says that back in the days, the inhabitants would tear down small parts of the fence to protect themselves against stray dogs. The fence was surrounding the area until one day when it got completely destroyed.
mihai has always known himself to fix, build and tear down fences, a type of work and activity that plunges him into a wide array of emotions: from tiredness, frustration, perfectionism, to slacking, injury, and triumph. On the other spectrum of triumph, the capitalist bite pervades in mono’s video work, a reenactment of Andy Warhol’s eating a burger (1982) scene that elevates it to the realms of madness. The ambivalent feeling of rejection and acceptance of capitalism in his artistic process is an ongoing question for mihai. Uncanniness devours his artistic media and Sequence gets transformed into a bitter-sweet-punk dream.
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Between September 27 and November 10, the gallery’s vitrine will enter into a direct dialogue with the public spaces that surround it through a series of artistic interventions, part of the project SEQUENCE & the public. Constantly accessible to the passers-by, the installations will propose a rethinking of the relation between art and the quotidian by activating the material and immaterial heritage of the Mântuleasa neighborhood. The works will nurture new possibilities of recontextualizing the notion of public space in the present, by entangling the practices of young local artists with the current context of an accelerating culture or with the more-than-human histories of the area.
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