Taik Persons Gallery presents Dragos Alexandrescu at LOOP14
DRAGOS ALEXANDRESCU
Exercising Failure,
2013
5’33’’
Single channel, HD video, color, sound
Edition
of 5 + 2AP
Presented
by Taik Persons Gallery (Berlin) at #LOOP14
The
society in which we live today has been variously termed “the post-industrial
society”, the “consumer society” or the “information age”. A legitimacy crisis
is shaking the political economy to the core, in what is proving to be the
deepest all encompassing recession in modern history. Those eager to diagnose
the condition of contemporary society speak of a shift in focus: a shift from
effort to desire, from production to consumption and from the real to the
virtual. We hear more and more of the simulative nature of our existence, of
the power of mass illusions, of the structural constraints inherent in the
system – whether our loyalty lies with Marx or Smith. Naturally, this engenders
a nostalgia for all things “genuine”, “authentic” and “real”, for a return to
the tangible, to simpler times.
With his film “Exercising Failure” the young Romanian artist Dragos Alexandrescu constructs a personal and evocative interpretation of the fragility of modern doctrines. Literally ripping out the pages of the books that form the foundations of our western thought structure, Alexandrescu transforms the works into physical raw material for future generations to form into the unknown.
Against the backdrop of the transformation of the works, from bound books to paper yarn, we hear the soundtrack from a popular Romanian television series “Pistruiatul”, one oft he faces of communist propaganda in the 1970s. It is an apocalyptic chant, that reminds us of the powerful connection between ideology and totalitarianism on the one hand, and the power of mass media on the other. “Exercising Failure” is a call to future generations to (re)construct what is effectively theirs to build.
“Watching someone knit can be a visible reminder that there are things more valuable than efficiency” Kate M Daley.
Dragos Alexandrescu was born in 1974 in Romania. He is based in Finland.
