Dragos Alexandrescu
Social Narrative Scenarios
Galleria Huuto, Pikkujätkä
5.–20.8.2017
Dragos Alexandrescu is a Romanian visual artist. Since 2007 he lives in Ostrobothnia,
Finland. Most of his art practice is a form of interrogation of the present, in which fictional narratives, based on our socio-economic structure, try to (re)produce an emotional rather than rational response from the audience. Each work is approaching and thus presenting elements of life, for the most part concerned with the period of structural fragility, economic and identity crises, which Europe is confronting with.
Since 2013 he started a collaboration with Taik Gallery, Berlin and his work have
been included in several private collections in Europe.
A selection of four of Alexandrescu’s video works will be presented: Exercising Failure (2013), Before was Better (2013), Social Binder(2015) and The Nature of Fear (2017) Though the films present complete, independent works, they are linked to one another through the overarching subject of human relationships and our interaction with contemporary political themes. 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 control, of the structural constraints inherent in the system – whether our loyalty lies with Marx or Smith. Alexandrescu is critical, but never cynical; straightforward, without being obtrusive; personal, yet far from sentimental. He observes with the same sobriety as his protagonists and opens up a near-to dauntingly fathomless space of imagination and interpretation that lingers over their loneliness, or aloneness.
Thanks to:
Svenska kulturfonden
TAIKE
Suomen Kulttuurirahasto
Svensk-Österbottniska Samfundet r.f.
Eugène, Elisabeth och Birgit Nygréns stiftelse
Further information:
drag.alexandrescu(at)gmail.com
