If technological evolution has changed the way we relate to art in any way, then it has certainly made us more alert, more action-oriented. A static existence no longer attracts us as it once did. We are looking for movement, colours, a mosaic of media of expression that convey, in their turn, a mosaic of feelings. It is the age of technology, a time when multimedia artists can reach the horizon and go beyond it.
This is the case of the artist duo Alice Gancevici and Remus Pușcariu of Romanian origin, based in Bucharest. The two graduated with a Master’s degree from the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam in 2015. Their training in the field of visual arts and stage directing is felt in their works, which delight the public with their various components, from installations to video, from objects to performative situations etc.
At the base of their creative process lies empirical observation – the artistic comments they make on different events in the society, which they reproduce in unique ways, by combining technology with the narrative threads. Using “theatrics” like tropes and ruses and many other aces up their sleeves, Alice Gancevici and Remus Pușcariu create an image of the world we live in, of the issues rooted in its core.
Their portfolio consists of works such as Accent From The Wound, an exhibition whose name was inspired by the last verse of the poem Song on Beholding and Enlightenment by Matias de Bocanegra, or If I Had My Way, a performative action with strong social references. Their works have been shown time in various places such as Salonul de Proiecte and Laboratorul de Imunologie (Romania), TAAK, tegenboschvanvreden (Netherlands), Tsarino (Bulgaria). The two artists are co-founders of the curatorial platform Template, and since 2012 they have cooperated with Bucharest AiR to organise an international residency program for artists in Bucharest.
For the 2021 edition of the Biennial, they have come up with a new work, The Predictive Conditional, an installation discussing the physiological process that gives you the well-known “goosebumps”, and homeostasis, the body’s tendency to maintain its internal stability regardless of the external environment. The work is a three-channel video installation made of cyclorama, wood, steel and aluminium, 3D photos, motors and, of course, a script. Besides the viewers of the installation, there is also a narrator, or rather three narrators corresponding to the three layers of the skin, who speak about the above processes and relate them to today’s existence, with all the excesses and lack of stimuli that characterise the pandemic period. The borders become fluid and the human body turns into an apparatus, an experiment, a story – it is guaranteed to give you goosebumps, no matter from which angle you look at it.