"Intalnire cu Istoria [Appointment with History] (2007 – ongoing) is a series of paintings, reproducing nineteenth-century realist techniques and representing a wide range of scenes, from a recent anti-capitalist demonstration in Basel to a queue of people standing outside a department store under communism, to crowds on Berlin’s Alexanderplatz in 1989, to a scene from the film Imposibila iubire [Impossible Love] (1983), where a worker in the 1950s contemplates the world that is being constructed. The series revisits the history of a realist language for social thinking in art and makes an urgent claim for the current agency of realism, one that is fully aware of its complicated past instrumentalizations."
excerpt from The History of Us All by Cosmin Costinas, Mona Vatamanu and Florin Tudor, monographic publication published by BAK and Post Editions, 2009.
Vatamanu and Tudor conceive of the spatial and temporal dimensions of history as dialectically interrelated in their work; they are not recycling, revisiting, reviving, or re-enacting. By critically diverting their attention away from the merely temporal and by mapping this metaphorically overburdened and historically scarred terrain, they are starting to measure, to return once more to Nancy, “the simultaneity and distance between us.” In this way, they can be said to productively interfere with standard historical paradigms and conceived notions of historical experience. As such, Vatamanu and Tudor are valuable escorts for those who wish to write the history of the present.
excerpt from Mapping the History of the Present by Vivian Rehberg, Mona Vatamanu and Florin Tudor, monographic publication published by BAK and Post Editions, 2009.
Dansul (Ende Gelände) /2022
Fuera Pena, Burning Effigy, 2014, Mexico City / 2016-18
Zone a defendre 1 / 2020
Carnaval of the Dead /2022
Somnul (studiu) / 2019
6 december2016 #No DAPL North Dakota2017
Black Lives Matter /2022
October 2020, Warsaw /2021
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Black summer (Australia) /2022
Ende Gelaende 1 / 2019
Zone a defendre 2 / 2020
Through this series of paintings Vatamanu and Tudor, an artist pair working together since 2000, perspicaciously examine symbols of collective revolt and solidarity past, present, and future while baring witness to how the revolutionary movement migrates across various geopolitical topographies and historic times, always in search of a better world. They join Zabel’s weighing in on the question of whether we have or haven’t had enough of Eastern Europe. “Yes and no,” Zabel answered. “’Yes,’ if we mean the political and cultural divisions and strategies of marginalization, ethnicization, exclusion, and (controlled) inclusion. But one cannot resolve such divisions by pretending that they do not exist and that they are simply an external circumstance that does not touch the ‘essence.’ It is only through repetition, through returning to and reworking the trauma that it can perhaps be slowly resolved, and not by repressing, ignoring, and forgetting it. ‘No,’ if we mean a reevaluation of the social and cultural potentials of Eastern Europe and their ability to transform and thereby transform European identity.”
There is however another critical implication that works like Întâlnire cu Istoria—among a number of Vatamanu and Tudor’s other pieces—make me think of, especially at this moment in time when we celebrate twenty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall. That these works so masterfully complicate the way we read through the various histories and political imaginaries has to do with the artists’ radical move away from thinking in juxtapositions and towards seeing the world as a complex entan- glement (Sarat Maharaj) of various competing realities. Contrary to that, our mindset is still to a large extent today imprisoned by Cold War dualities, though it seems that it is about time to begin recognizing that not only “over there” but also here equally, 1989 caused a seismic shift in society, politics, economy, and culture, with far reaching effects of global consequence.
Even the two decades that have passed since these major political changes were not long enough to bring a transformation in the mindset of those of us in the West, which would be necessary to understand how much we and our little western province have altered and been impacted by the immense changes in the world at large. With little self-reflection and with an attachment to past hegemony, we continue to believe that it is we who provide the rest of the world with the universal values to base their lives upon; we who write history, the history of art included; and that it is our right to extend to others permission to think (or not think) otherwise. It is not. The current economic crisis, the continuous rise of right-wing populism, unmanaged problems with migration, the wars waged on our behalf, and many other problems one could enumerate here, attest to this failure to rethink the world out of its asymmetries, and to re-imagine ourselves away from a static, superior place in the world.
excerpt from Foreword by Maria Hlavajova, Mona Vatamanu and Florin Tudor, monographic publication published by BAK and Post Editions, 2009.
exhibition views, Omnia Communia Deserta, La Loge, Brussels, 2020; images by Lola Pertsowsky.
Vatamanu and Tudor have continued their perhaps inevitable movement toward a dialectical realism, very consciously intensifying their dialogue with both “socialist painting” and the halting renewal of leftist politics today. Their contribution to the 5th Berlin Biennial in 2008 consisted of a space with rows of empty chairs and a lectern. On the surrounding walls, there were small format paintings that seemed to contain all the mud of real socialism’s agonizing “transition” to real capitalism and vice versa, all the accumulated dirt. Kept in a small, nearly dilettantish format, they have been executed in a style that balances between a socialist spezzatura (the light touch of Yuri Pimenov or Alexander Labas) and a deep, muddy melancholia. Historical scenes and contemporary protesting crowds with red flags are intermixed. Side by side we see imagery familiar to us from recent anti-globalization demonstrations in Basel, Rostock, and Genoa along with pictures that show the crowds in Timisoara, Bucharest, and on Berlin Alexanderplatz in 1989. In addition there are images from the mediated, nearly nostalgic socialist every- day: scenes from the Romanian blockbuster Imposibila iubire [Impossible Love] (1983) and images of people queuing for bread—images of protest and expropriation, images of resignation and hope. The empty lectern seems to invite the audience to become the subject of its own history and to hold a political meeting in the exhibition space. Yet an audio soundtrack of a voice reading Marx and Engel’s Communist Manifesto blocks this political speech, and also interferes with any apolitical, purely aesthetic pleasure the paintings might otherwise provide. Anything that is said or seen here must be said or seen against the backdrop of the Manifesto.
The dissonance here is very clear: Vatamanu and Tudor’s paintings show that they, in some sense, are sympathetic to one of the Manifesto’s central ideas, namely that all history is the history of class struggles, so that Genoa and Timisoara belong to the same series, even if the former was “against” a na- tional communist regime and the latter “against” the regime of global neolib- eral capitalism. But at the same time, their use of audio creates an interference, pointing toward a historical rupture that makes it difficult if not impossible to reassume this continuity, even from afar. From the Manifesto to the chapter on primitive accumulation discussed above, clearly Marx’s intention was to create maximum distance to a possible violence to come, a violence inevita- ble in the process of an as-of-yet-incomplete bourgeois revolution. This is a project that received new impulses from the collapse of state socialism, a project that may now be coming closer and closer to its logical end. Given these conditions, we might well read Vatamanu and Tudor’s works as more rigorous and honest than so many other superficial, overly conscious identi- fications with a diffuse “leftist” criticality found in contemporary art and culture today.
excerpt from The Wrong Version of Kapital by David Riff, Mona Vatamanu and Florin Tudor, monographic publication published by BAK and Post Editions, 2009.
