Lightheartedly capturing the often-grim reality of these multitudes caught between conflicting economic systems, the new “Your survival is guaranteed by treaty” exhibition of works by Ciprian Mureşan opens today at Budapest’s Ludwig Museum, featuring assorted installations, performance-art videos, photographs, and multimedia works that recontextualize common historical, social, and cultural references of Romania and the erstwhile Eastern bloc.
While many of these pieces play upon allusions to specific Romanian circumstances that will not be familiar for many foreigners, a lot of the most striking visions transcend their context to simply reflect the innate yearning of all humans to exercise some control over their surroundings, along with feelings of powerlessness experienced by the common people.
The first piece shown in the exhibit is “Untitled (Franz Kafka: Amerika)”, a shopping cart loaded with numerous copies of the groundbreaking Czech author’s unfinished first novel, all collected between 2010 and 2014. Just as the book’s protagonist is overwhelmed with disillusionment after leaving his familiar home to settle in an unforgiving new land, the subjects of Mureşan’s works are disenfranchised from the cold comforts of communism that they were accustomed to, and cast into a harsh new capitalistic actuality where they are now more vulnerable than ever, all without going anywhere.
The exhibit continues with a series of rolling trash cans – now found ubiquitously throughout the towering panel-apartment complexes constructed in every formerly Soviet-dominated nation – mounted with train wheels on a narrow-gauge railroad track, propelling themselves in a never-ending cycle of routine consumerism and waste disposal.
Next we watch 2008’s “Untitled (Ceauşescu)”, a video that documents the painting of a picture that Mureşan commissioned fellow artist Adrian Ghenie to create: a stately portrait of overthrown communist-era Romanian president Nicolae Ceauşescu, standing in a position of power as though his downfall never occurred. By asking his associate to create a reverential artwork of a controversial public figure and recording the process, Mureşan revisits the moral quandaries that artists were forced into during totalitarian times.
Highlighting the current state of life in Romania amid its dilapidated Soviet-built infrastructure, “Auto-da-Fé” (2008) is a collection of 154 photographs portraying passages from chapter seven of Elias Canetti’s titular novel, when a reclusive philologist declares war in his library as he speaks to the books as though they are his soldiers. Sentences of this passage are scrawled on disintegrating concrete walls, abandoned cars, the interior of toilet stalls, on dented public signs, and myriad other surfaces of depressed communities, demonstrating the futility that modern artists face while attempting to address perceived injustices amid an indifferent populace.
However, the piece that best encapsulates Mureşan’s oeuvre is the 2011 video “I’m Protesting Against Myself”, starring a meek gray-haired puppet leading a one-man demonstration from within a dumpster to draw attention to his own inability to deal with contemporary life. Representing the despondent condition of individuals who still want to protest after the power of the people is compromised, the puppet declares that he is protesting his own existence because he does not believe that protesting can achieve anything, because he is afraid to join protests, because he has no courage, and because he is scared and sick and has no hope left.
From the perspective of Eastern Europeans who lived through the heady days of regime change, “Your survival is guaranteed by treaty” may be a subtly disturbing reminder that national independence has not always benefited the greater populace in the decades that followed the USSR’s breakdown, and that a new generation of post-communist artists is now attempting to understand this widespread disappointment by examining its root causes. However, for people who are not familiar with the experience of living in this geopolitical region, Mureşan’s new exhibit will surely enlighten viewers with its touching elements of surreal humor.
“Your survival is guaranteed by treaty” is on view at the Ludwig Museum through March 22.
