Adina Mocanu
Hi there! My name is Adina Mocanu and I work as an artist since I first appeared into this world, 32 years ago, in The Cherry Tree Valley, a small village from the South of Romania. This is my artist statement. I could tell you a well fitted story about communism, about East Europe and how I perceived it as a child, some clichés that might still work. Or I could tell about how I loooooove cooking and how I’ve read Bourriaud’s ‘Relational Aesthetics’ and how now finally I have a meaning to my meaningless quiche. I could tell you some intelligent thoughts, I could name a careful selection of art authors very hot right now, using their arguments to prove that my art is unique and valuable. I could and probably I should. Instead of all that, I will tell you something real. And the reality comes at simple. I will tell you all the stuff that I shouldn’t tell you. I live in duality because I truly believe that we are in the era of BI-something. I’m a past resident of The Academy of France in Rome – Villa Medici and I’m a Fan Girl. Sometimes I’m concerned about the future of Art and sometimes thinking about the sense of life gives me a headache so I swiftly open Netflix. I hope you will enjoy my works and I hope that, even for a millisecond you will think something that you didn’t think today. I live for these milliseconds of eternity. Due to my overusing of the verb ‘think’ in these you can deduce that I’m a over-thinker. But thinking about everything goes to thinking about nothing and there I like usually to spend some time, cause in the void nothing matters. No–thing!
I hopelessly trust people, but I’m also the most cynic person that I know – making plans in the case the Planet blows out or some sort of extinction happens because it will happen, I mean it’s history already (it was 2017 when I wrote these lines, well...). I’m fascinated with boundaries, contours, human skin and Elon Musk. I see my body in a structure of layers, each adding on top of another, very much as the stars’ light is traveling through the Universe since the Big Bang. I’m lazy, but I never met an artist that’s not lazy, so I guess it’s OK. Lately, I have planned more and more working with VR and Internet Art. I am Young and I am Old. I feel enthusiasm towards my life journey, but I feel tiredness too. I can find 1 trillion reasons that make Art Bad and I can find 1 trillion 1 reasons that make Art Awesome. I’m obsessed with Pop culture. I like to think at myself as being special, but who doesn’t think about themselves as special in this era? At least 500 millions of Instagram users do. So, I might be nothing but ordinary. (long pause) But really, I’m not. I’m a Millennial, for God’s sake, so yes, I’m definitely special. I dream about making art accessible to the masses (and that’s a duality too). Beside famous Art Magazines I read Rookie and I believe in thinking at Art in a fresher / teen way will generate for art a meaningful future. I can give you a seria of hashtags for my work: #bodyrelated #performance #mindovermatter #peculiar #mature #immature #simulacrum #virtuality #now #consciousness #presence #boundaries
BLUE PRESENCE (2019) Big spaces can be full of energy and overwhelming for the common people, these spaces representing symbols of power and richness. In ‘Blue Presence’, I decided to create a digital manipulated video, inhabiting different spaces of the Villa Rohannec’h in a synchronized action. My presence is concentrated mostly at the windows, and therefore on the border between two spaces: the ‘inside’, and the ‘outside’. The immense villa is perceived, due to the multiple presences, as a doll house, a diorama. BEING NINA: THE GARLIC, THE SPHERE AND THE MATCHES (2019) A video installation at Villa Rohannec’h and an experimental film in development, ‘Being Nina’, speaks about the human wish to be different, extraordinary, a God, to possess powers beyond its human nature. The film has 13 chapters and starts from a re-enactment after the performances of Nina Kulagina, a Russian housewife famous for her alleged psychokinetic powers, the footage of whom was smuggled out of the USSR and into the US during the Cold War. During the 13 chapters, Nina’s powers will grow and we will see her transition from a housewife to a form of Deity. ‘Being Nina: The Garlic, The Sphere and the Matches’ represents the first chapter of this story. first chapter of the video project developed in the residency A Villa of One's Own, curated by Anca Verona MIhulet, Iris Ordean and Isabelle Henrion
DOPPELGANGERS (2019) video, first part, 7 minutes <In the piece ‘Doppelgangers’, the artist has encountered a very strange occurrence, namely the haphazard presence of 22 burned circles in the field Le Tertre Marie Dondaine in Saint-Brieuc. Is this a sign of paranormal activity? She has since investigated the strange phenomenon, has conducted a series of on-site interviews, and is planning on creating a video installation from the research documentation she has gathered.> Iris Ordean, curator
BLINK TWICE | BEING BATMAN (2019) France, Romania The video mirror pieces are focusing on the idea of the ‘superhero’ and the small town (as opposed to the big cities we’re used to seeing every superhero in), and on how this new duality redefines the idea of the ‘hero(ine)’. project developed in the residency A Villa of One's Own, curated by Anca Verona MIhulet, Iris Ordean and Isabelle Henrion stills from the video that is work in progress
THE NIGHT OF THE THREE MOONS (2018) The performance has its roots in the concept of charging - of channeling the Nature’s energy, the Moon’s energy, and Land’s energy through my Body and then to my audience. The action, thus meditative and contained in a clear visual form, has a playful facet - it is mirroring an action that people are familiar with: getting a Suntan. The poses that I chose for the performance are a reminder of the work of Isadora Duncan, an American choreographer that traveled through Europe in the early 20th century. Isadora created a new dance style, inspired by Ancient Greek sculptures and their body movements. For my performance, I absorbed some of the most known body poses in the art history, I reenacted them and I juxtaposed them to the image of the Land, of the Night and of the Moon. Mainly, those were my intentions during the creation of the performance. Of course, other further concepts can be developed: the Land - Body relation, the Veil between the outside world and the inside world. courtesy of Joana Grevers Foundation
THE LAST INDIANA MORNING (2017) Breakups, breakups. You can break up from a lover, a place, a moment, a past self, a piece of clothing. We all go through some breakups and we all say it’s ‘fine’ overall. What we don’t want to accept about breakups is that we never actually break up from nothing and we never can stop remembering. We carry that energy around, it’s part of ourselves from that moment on, it’s our brand-new phantom added to a long list of other phantoms. We don’t want to accept this because it means that our next step will become our phantom too. We don’t want to accept that a breakup is about us and not about ‘them’. And we don’t want to have that kind of responsibility, we don’t want to be conscious about our vulnerabilities, losses and hard lessons. What we want is to live in denial, to pretend that we don’t remember nothing at all and to dream about a perfect future where nothing from our past matters. In Indiana I threw myself into so many breakups, and in the last morning spent there I wanted to create a piece about remembering and cherishing that state of passage, of transformation, of adding new layers to my persona. I wanted to remember how it feels remembering all too well.
The project ‘THE COLOR OF THE MOON (2014)’ came to life at the proposal of Simona Vilau - art curator based in Bucharest. She had the idea of a project featuring 4 artists and their story about Moon, a romantic idea that I found to be very exciting. For my installation, I chose a room shaped in a cube form and I covered it in approximately 4800 squares, each of them measuring 4 / 4 inches. I painted each square in a different unique color creating a 3D painting / environment. The public could enter the ‘environment’ and they were asked which of the 4800 shades they link with the Moon. I received a lot of positive feedback from people, the installation being described as ‘joyous’, ‘distressful’, ‘candid’, ‘bright’, ‘inspirational’.
Playing around with Gummy Bears (2017) 1st scenario I like gummy. This awful substance made from animal cartilages through a long process of chemical transformations. It comes in different colors and shapes and it’s funny to fool around with. I made myself a Rosario to pray away the doubts regarding the ethical problems of the gummy. 2nd scenario I made myself a Rosario to pray for a world in which cows are not transformed in colored Gummy Bears anymore. 3rd scenario Consumerism = The New Religion. But you already knew that. So, let’s pray.
THE TAMING (2017)
 A snowball of fat. The most gorgeous pearl white that I have ever seen. I fantasize about being inside the fat, swimming through fat molecules, choking from too much matter. Finding my warm place - where I’m the perfect fit. Bury myself in fat, passing a ritual of disappearance. The fat is slowly liquefying, with each of my touching changing its boundaries, drowning in relativity...
... I started this work having in mind two of my favorite creators, Joseph Beuys & Gustav Meyrink (The Golem) and a visual memory of my mother making homemade soap back in my childhood. The fat made me think about how real is ‘reality’ and how limitative or limitless is our world; how wrong can we be in perceiving reality and how superficial we are in defining truth.
We live in between chat lines, we live in the commercial breaks and in the elevator music. We live on the subway platforms and high legs fast food chairs. We live in the books that we don’t read and in the regrets that we don’t have. We live in the fields that we imagine in the middle of the night. We live in between 2:59 and 3 AM. We live in the tiny little reflex smiles that conquer our faces during doing laundry. We breath our own dandruff and we sleep on our own scars. We smell the vodka and we think about love. I want to be chill, I want to be happy. I want to feel your hand on my chin and my bare feet on the generic carpet. I want to live inside the cliché, I want to be a snow globe on your night stand.
A thousand kisses deep / Infinite_Kisses (2014 - 2021) a supercut of us Back in March 2014 I’ve started the relationship with Catalin, my Gemini born on the same day as myself ex boyfriend. After 1 year and a half into the relationship I had to go to Villa Medici and he had to go to the USA, for his Master. Even though we never thought we will last due to the 10 000 kilometers apart, we promised each other infinite kisses. For 7 years we shaped millions of pixels into kisses with our pointy lips, creating our own gallery of virtual kisses. The video was shown in 2019 during Art Brusseles, in the section SCREEN IT.
THE STAGES OF A DROWNING (2013) A hypnotic piece of visual art, THE STAGES OF A DROWNING seeks to explore a mental state created by the contrast between specialized and poetical language” (ADINA MOCANU). A medical text presenting the stages of drowning is juxtaposed to an abstract visual composition – depicting a treetop with quivering leaves and an artesian well – accompanied by a disturbing sound-design. Initially observational, the shots are stylized stage after stage through different filters and exposures as seen from the presumed subjective point of view of the drowning person, that gradually turns into the spectator’s point of view. (Oana Ghera, BIEFF)
Casting Tape (2018) 'Every cell in the human body regenerates on average, every 7 years. Like snakes, in our own way, we shed our skin. Biologically, we are brand, new people. We may look the same, we probably do, but change isn't visible...not in most of us, but we all change, completely, forever.' Grey’s Anatomy "WITH YOU I'M BORN AGAIN" airdate: September 23, 2010
written by: Krista Vernoff
directed by: Rob Corn Yes, I just quoted Grey’s Anatomy. I could have used the old dusty Metamorphosis reference instead, I know. ‘I don’t recognize myself’ is a piece about the days when you wake up not feeling yourself, completely changed, a shell without content, an actor in somebody else’s movie. Looking in the mirror you smile on different notes, hoping that you’ll set apart the innocent out of the thieves. Sadly, you never do.
©AdinaMocanu Contact: adinamocanu@yahoo.com +4079214509