Introduction

Hello everyone, I am back with my fourth blog. This time I’ll be writing about a young Romanian visual artist and performer called Adina Mocanu. She was born in Videle, Romania in 1990 and currently lives and works in Bucharest. She has an MFA and a BFA from the University of Art in Bucharest. She was part of a residency at the French Academy of Rome, the Villa Medici from 2015-2016. Adina was also a resident and art teacher at Collins Living-Learning Centre at the University of Indiana, USA the first half of 2017. She spent the second half of the year 2017 in New Orleans, USA working on a series of works that are still in progress. Adina also took part at a residency called “A Villa of One’s Own” in France during the French-Romanian year, which was in 2019, and created 3 works exploring new possible realities.

She works mainly with performance and video, but often integrates installation, photography and drawing in her practice. She is searching for methods to change the perception of her participants or viewers to subtly alter their perspective about reality.

Adina stated that performance came into her life as a natural development of her practice. She always tried to work with art at different levels and therefore used different media: objects, installation, video and photography. She believes that different media transport certain ideas better and therefore chose to not be an artist of a sole medium.

Adina’s main purpose for art is exploring the different dimensions of the world, dreaming about impossible things and pushing boundaries as far as they can be pushed.

Early Works

One of her earlier works called “The Stages of a Drowning” is a hypnotic piece of visual art that seeks to explore a mental state created by the contrast between specialised and poetical language according to the artist. Adina juxtaposes a medical text presenting the stages of drowning against an abstract visual composition accompanied by a disturbing sound-design. Initially observational, the shots are stylized through different filters and exposures as seen from the subjective point of view of the drowning person, that gradually turns into the spectator’s point of view.

Connecting with nature and exploring the paranormal

One of her works called “The Night of the Three Moons” really impressed me also because of the scenery and the beautiful landscape she performed it in which was in the Romanian countryside, in a lavender field under the full moon. The performance has its roots in the concept of channelling the Nature’s energy, the Moon’s energy and the Land’s energy through her body and to her audience. The action is meditative and contained in a clear visual form.

The poses she chose for the performance were related to Isadora Duncan who was an American choreographer that travelled through Europe in the early 20^th Century. During that time Isadora created a new dance style, inspired by Ancient Greek sculptures and their body movements. Adina was influenced by this dance and incorporated some of the most known body poses of art history into her performance, re-enacted them and juxtaposed them to the image of the Land, of the Night and of the Moon.

During the time Adina spent at the Villa Rohannec’h in Saint-Brieuc, France she made the work “Being Nina: The Garlic, The Sphere and the Matches”. This is a video installation and an experimental film in development; it is about the human wish to be different, extraordinary or to possess powers beyond human nature. The film has 13 chapters and starts with a re-enactment after the performances of Nina Kulagina, who was a Russian housewife that had alleged psychokinetic powers. The footage of Nina was smuggled out of the USSR and into the US during the Cold War. During the 13 chapters, Nina’s powers will grow, and she will transition from a housewife to a form of Deity.

Post-Internet and Virtual Reality

Lately Adina has started working more with virtual reality as well as Internet Art. As was mentioned earlier she wants to push boundaries and therefore make her viewers think about different realities or subtly change their perspectives about certain topics through her performances or videos.

Adina’s Internet pieces are more Post-Internet, this is the case because she created several fake social media accounts and started having random conversations using these different personas and exploring the degree of intimacy and trust that can be accessed, as well as the need for conversation and sharing in general. She plans to publish excerpts about it on her website this year after she gathered more materials and to share her different pseudonyms.

An artwork which shows her Post-Internet idea is a video called “A Thousand Kisses Deep” (2014-2018) which was made entirely on the internet, through internet means. This work was also shown at Art Brussels in 2019 in the section SCREEN IT.

She also likes to work in virtual reality (VR) and plans to propose a project to a theatre where the audience shall attend the show via VR – the performance will be live, but the stage design will be entirely made on the computer. The audience will see the juxtaposition between Adina and her surroundings (created via VR technology) and they can “be her” by switching perspectives.

Conclusion

Adina is a very innovative artist that uses art as a means to understand the human psyche and make her audiences think and see the world through a different perspective. Her using different types of media also shows that she wants to explore art in all its glory without worrying about boundaries of a certain medium. Her works tackle supernatural occurrences, social media, how we perceive the world, the connection we have with the nature surrounding us and even imagining what it feels like drowning. Her ideas seem limitless and now that she will be exploring virtual reality, I’m sure we will be seeing even more amazing artworks and performances within the years to come.

I want to finish this blog with a piece of art that I find interesting and funny at the same time it’s called “Playing around with Gummy Bears”. It is about her firstly describing how gummy is made of animal cartilages through a long process of chemical transformations which comes in different shapes and colours. In the end she makes a Rosary out of the gummy bears to pray the doubts of the ethical problems of the gummy. Therefore, criticising the industry but doing so in a light way.

Should you have more interest in other young, emerging artists have a look at these links:
https://arthotshot.com/kinetic-artist-stefan-radu-cretu/
https://arthotshot.com/interview-with-the-artist-albert-kaan/
https://arthotshot.com/young-artists-young-friends-new-contemporaries/