CZ

PRESS RELEASE

opening 10.7. 2006 at 6 pm

Exhibition dates: July 11th to July 30th, 2006

Karlin Studios, Křižíkova 34, Praha 8, 150 00

We cordially invite you to the presentation of new projects by the young Romanian artist Ciprian Mureşan (born in 1977 in Cluj, he is one of the most talented artists of his generation, and has already taken part in several significant international shows). His 5 weeks residence in Prague is the first of a new artists' residency program that FUTURA plans to regularly develop in the KARLIN STUDIOS, to help opening up Prague's art scene to the best of the youngest international art world, and to create international opportunities for Czech artists too. This event is part of an larger exchange project, supported by the Czech Ministry of Culture and the Czech Centre in Bucarest, which has produced an exhibition of the Czech artist Jan Jakub Kotik in the Romanian capital too.

Mureşan's first project presented in Karlin Studios is a remake of the „Rhinoceros" play, read by primary school children. It deals, in the context of re-interpretation of the meanings of the original text of Eugene Ionesco, with the necessity to speak about the position of individual and his/her relation with the collective processes. The video is not re-making or quoting, but translating, through the performance of children, ambiguous situations, limitations of individual contexts.

The second project, that he developed during his artist residence in FUTURA´s studio in Karlin Studios, in cooperation with the young Czech writer Jakub Filip Novák, analyzes the subtlest mechanism of propagation of culture and historic and national clichés, using simple methods taken from pop-culture and comics. The subject: the adventures of Asterix and Obelix, in one of their legendary wanderings, this time through the smoky pubs of Prague.

Ciprian Mureşan's latest art interventions use a calculated reference to famous, iconic works in modern and contemporary art history. Through the recontextualization of "Leap into the Void" by Yves Klein, of Tarkovsky's movie "Andrei Rublev" (about the Russian icon painter), of "Un Chien andalou" by Luis Buňuel and Salvador Dalí (where he changed the original characters with the ones from the cartoon Shrek) or of Maurizio Cattelan's "La Nona Ora" (where he substituted the pope John Paul II, crashed by a meteorit, with the patriarch of the Romanian Church) , Mureşan deals with some problems of the contemporary society: the modernist utopia, the implications of new technologies on visual culture, the fetishism of cartoon characters, the relationship between the state (the civil society) and the church.