In the condition of nonbattle, when you have nothing on which to act tangibly, there is still one thing you can do: act on that condition. Act to change the conditions in which you wait.” Brian Massumi, Ontopower: War, Powers, and the State of Perception (Duke University Press, 2015), 69.

Blind Spot - an expansive multi-media installation by Romanian-born London-based artist Vladimir Florentin -interrogates the technologically charged space of the nonbattle - a term originally coined by Virilio to describe how technology has impacted the logic of war. Florentin’s installation holds a mirror up to the processes that de ne contemporary violence and con ict; processes that play out through sophisticated technological networks both in periods of action and waiting. As we navigate the hallucinatory space of Florentin’s installation, we are met with familiar yet distorted symbols - calibration markers, resolution targets, maps anddiagrams. These graphic symbols become the backdrop for sculptural interventions that imagine what might happen if we disrupt the operational violence of capitalism, highlighting the potential agency we have in a society increasingly structured, organised and controlled by data technologies. Florentin is interested in images that operate rather than represent, and looks to a future where we might use these systems of control against themselves.

The central work of the installation imagines a steel aircraft, seemingly crashed into the graphic markers that it relies upon; the image misbehaves and causes the aircraft to fail. Part-drone, part paper-plane, the crashed object embodies the child-like dreams of  ight and the crashing reality of technologicallydriven systems. As Virilio notes, whenever any new technology is invented or deployed, it is at that moment that a new accident is invented.

At this point of technological failure, we question where human intervention sits within this large-scale system. Florentin’s installation does not overlook human presence and includes a sculptural portrait of a  gure that at once resists the machine whilst is also seemingly made for machine readability. The portrait work questions the points at which machine vision fails or misreads - the zones of misclassi cation and systematic error, whilst simultaneously o ers tactics of intentional invisibility, re-enacting the potential to resist the violence of extractive data capitalism. Florentin’s investigations into the potential of these tactics also extend to typography, employing designs that turn letters into optical noise and using surveillance-resistant type faces. The installation includes a printed adaptation of a 2010 broadcasted exchange that occurred when a dormant Soviet-era station was interrupted by a human voice. The human interaction with the mechanical drone of the broadcast is transcribed using a type face that resists machine readability; words that can be seen but not clearly read  signals in reverse.

The distorted text and symbols act as a graphic score to the sonic backdrop of the installation. Synthetic voices tuned to refuse speech recognition systems are woven with fragments of stealth  eld recordings, cut and distorted as if the remnants of a broken translation engine. Through doing so, Florentin deliberately draws attention to the blind spots in contemporary surveillance caused both through intentional resistance and machinic failure. As witnesses, we are left in a space of re-callibration, questioning the future of a society governed by a broken system./Felicity Hammond





︎︎︎ the work is an installation made of metal, pesplex, aluminium

Proiectul propune o explorare critică a vieții urbane contemporane, ca reflecție asupra configurațiilor vizuale performative și arhitecturale ale orașelor noastre.

Primul vernisaj are loc la 2/3 Galeria și aduce în prim-plan lucrările artiștilor contemporani Mihai Șovăială, Nico Krebs & Taiyo Onorato. Cel de-al doilea vernisaj are loc la Goethe-Institut unde sunt expuse lucrările artiștilor Sebastian Stumpf și Vladimir Florentin.

Această serie de expoziții își propune să răspundă unor întrebări esențiale mediului fotografic, plecând de la premisa artistului creator de imagini noi: „Imaginați-vă că sunteți fotograf și trebuie să ieșiți în lume pentru a crea imagini noi. Dar ce înseamnă afară în zilele noastre și ce face ca imaginile să fie noi? Cât de eficientă mai este fotografia ca mijloc artistic într-o epocă în care totul a fost deja fotografiat, iar un flux nesfârșit de imagini conectate inundă totul? Ce întrebări trebuie abordate astăzi? Și cum?”

Expozițiile With / Against the Flow. Intervenții fotografice contemporane prezintă, prin prisma practicilor artistice individuale si colective, artiști care trăiesc în Germania, alături de artiști români care redefinesc fotografia ca mediu. Ei explorează critic perspective ale vieții urbane contemporane, utilizând fotografia, video-ul, foto-obiectele și instalația. Ceea ce unește aceste poziții artistice este forma intervenției: fie direct asupra materialității fotografiilor, fie direct în realitatea exterioară proprie imaginii fotografice. Proiectul face parte dintr-un program itinerant organizat de IFA – Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, aceasta fiind curatoriată de Florian Ebner și Christin Müller.






︎︎︎ the work is an installation made of metal, pesplex, aluminium

CHIPS

On the 1st of March we are delighted to host a show that takes a closer look at the inner workings of the fashion world: the relationship between the models, the photographer and the modeling agencies. Chipping at the walls of the "fashion monster" as he calls it, aspiring talents usually need to follow an almost predefined set of steps to get their foot in the door. Șerban hijacks this ladder and assembles his own type of low-budget/high-impact structure through a series photographs .

The exhibition runs us through a 20sqm hoarder's flat used as a background for shooting different models, as well as peculiar details, and quiet objects, captured during three separate trips taken to the very same apartment in the city’s 19th arrondissement. Șerban creates set designs with stuff found in every room, exploits the clutter and turns it into a beautiful frame for the portraits, bringing depth and narrative to an otherwise dull comp card.

Șerban Andrei (b.1999, Bucharest, Romania) is an emerging photographer working around the fashion industry, with brief pitstops for experimentation in every other corner of the art world.Taking the trips and doing everything by himself - the calls and emails, carefully scheduling his shooting days in the short time visiting, managing a tight budget, they all bring out a meticulous and ritualistic way of approaching things.

All artworks is printed in a limited edition giclee prints, DM if intrested.

The exhibition is accompanied by an artist publication entiatled CHIPS, published by Papertraffic.

THE PHOTOGRAPHS
I WISH I’D TAKEN

The photographs Alexandru Paul "wishes he had taken" are, in fact, images he actually did take, though not in the conventional sense of capturing a moment from reality through the lens & shutter. These images are all photomontages representing public spaces from various places, embodying the architecture of the agora as a collective, simultaneous manifestation. Part of the "Hidden Stories" series (2008-2010), the works, presented in the post-pandemic context, gain a new significance as many of us have experienced a potentially irreconcilable shift in our perception of the public sphere.

For a country with a history steeped in propaganda and mass manipulation, ongoing, like the wound of hemophilia coloring a present of another political system that relies on the f low propagation of "images of desire", with is advertisement as a new standardized image alphabet, the photomontage emerges as a natural technique today. Unlike propaganda images that typically remove individuals, Paul's approach is integrative, merging compositionally rich scenes with subtle, everyday invasions that guide our relationships with the subjects. All the images in the final composition are taken from the same angle and within a narrow time frame to avoid the differences of light shades. The images rely rather on the elements specific to the composition of the medium of painting, in narrative themes like a genuine genre scene.

I prefer to call them images instead of photographs, being constructed and not mirrored, as happens on the surface of a camera sensor. The scenes are, otherwise, composed in the large quadrature of the monitor, not in the unmediated one of the viewfinder. Two different balls in the air, 2 dogs ready to sniff eachother, soap bubbles on the left and the patriotic fire on the right, are tropes taken from one of the images in the series. Outstretched arms that guide our vanishing point outside the frame, children encircling in a veritable "figura serpentinata" movement, a character from early 2000s ready to give up, with the chin in his chest – are elements of other compositions. We are talking about a homogeneous typology of photomontage in which only a few fragments are used to form scenes charged with strangeness.

Historically, the relationship between photography and painting has been contentious, evolving from imitation and camouf lages to a specific differentiation with the advent of modernism, and finally to a symbiotic, intermedia discourse following the rapid advance of advertising and television in the 60s. Photomontage, developed as a technique for commercials in the 1890s, was artistically embraced by Dada and other avant-garde movements, emphasizing discrepancy over seamless transitions common in post-war artistic practice. Back in those days, the accent was put on the discrepancy, rather than on the sinuous passage that hides the cut, as happens in post-war artistic practice. Alexandru Paul's works come precisely from here, from a strategy in which all the historical techniques of montage are reversed, replacing disjunction with narrative and discontinuity with a constructed homogeneity.

Albert Renger-Patzsch's concept of "photographed photography" ref lects the tension between compositionally and structurally perfect images championed by the Neue
Sachlichkeit. Similarly, Paul's images, more than mere "photographs he would have wanted to make," are like this, suggesting an imminent, significant event, always outside the frame and inaccessible to the viewer. This unnamed tension between the objectively real and subjective interpretation permeates his work, sometimes in suspense as here, other times more conceptually, as in "The Mirror and the Camera."

These works pose a difficult question: are they documentary? In their three spatial dimension, they are truthful — those figures were there, performing those actions. However, what betrays them comes from the 4th dimension, the temporal one. Yes, all elements were in the frame, but not simultaneously, suggesting new relations and (non)events. Thus, Paul's practice can be termed meta-documentary, as he similarly approached in the "Posh Slums" series, framing negligible and disturbing elements of vernacular urban architecture within the grand tradition of architectural photography.

Words by Horațiu Lipot