KAJET JOURNAL

OBSESSION NEVER SLEEPS

Kajet Journal is very happy to announce the opening of “Obsession Never Sleeps”, an exhibition that seeks to examine the obsessive dimension of memory. The exhibition brings together new works by three Bucharest-based artists, Andreea Badea, Nikita Dembinski, and Robert Antoniac.

In an attempt to come to terms with their own personal pasts and compulsions, phantasms and obsessions, the artists are reconstructing fragments from recent histories that are hidden in personal narratives or counter-normative chronologies. If macro-level history, as an empirical tool of acquiring knowledge about the rest of the world, is concerned with recovering a memory that is allegedly factual, their micro-histories are focused on personal, as well as fictional, memories; on distorted fragments that hinge around obsessive traces of a past that may or may not have happened.

Obsession drills into our psyche, degrades the quality of our memories, obscures our real or imagined timelines, and conjures personal ghosts. Obsession functions as a catalyst that connects us to our own past and its myriad of meanings, but also as a violent weapon that impairs our recollection of former events. Whether we are contemplating the material planes and their sinuous geographies or the shifting layers of the incorporeal, our most haunting memories survive in this liminal space of existence, between reality and imagination.

Artists: Andreea Badea, Nikita Dembinski, Robert Antoniac
Location: La Firul Ierbii, Splaiul Unirii 160, Bucharest
Exhibition dates: 15 October—15 November 2021
Visual identity: Regular Practice
More info here.

Open:
28 October 14:00—18:00
29 October 14:00—18:00
30 October 13:00—18:00
04 November 14:00—18:00
05 November 14:00—18:00
06 November 13:00—18:00
11 November 14:00—18:00
12 November 14:00—18:00
13 November 13:00—18:00
15 November 14:00—18:00

“Obsession Never Sleeps” aims to uncover parallel experiences within a shared universe: memory as quotidian relic (Andreea Badea), memory as speculative imagination (Nikita Dembinski), memory as archival degradation (Robert Antoniac).

Andreea Badea reimagines the cabinet of curiosities as an apparatus of taxonomies through which physical, as well as abstract, memories are resurfaced. This bespoke atlas is composed of photographs, found objects, and personal artefacts. By referencing quotidian relics of our shared pasts, the fragmented flashbacks are liberated from the subjugation of memory; they are released and set free in the public space, while the materiality of the referenced object is confronted with the collective memory of the audience.

Nikita Dembinski highlights the speculative nature of memory. The constant questioning of subjective recollection begins with emotional images that haunt the artist’s consciousness and make him wonder about the nature of reality. What stands between actuality and perception and where can one find certainty? Dembinski interprets the obsessive character of memory by setting images, objects, and events in an immobilised state, thus allowing the audience to summon and reinterpret their own subjective memories.

Robert Antoniac engages with the convoluted processes associated with the degradation of memory. By re-contextualising images from his own archives—genealogical and contemporary alike, found images as well as fashion and art photography, personal and accidental, sketches and photomontage—Antoniac is interested in the way such instances of visual matter survive the passage of time. If memory is identified as the very source that distorts the image, it is the resulting compositions that function as testimonies that reproduce the artist’s visual obsessions.

Media partners: Scena9, DOR, Glamour, Liternet, RFI, Sub25, Revista Zeppelin, Igloo, Modernism.ro, Aqua Carpatica, WET.

Visual identity: Regular Practice.

The project is co-funded by the Administration of the National Cultural Fund and Kajet Journal.

The project does not necessarily represent the position of the Administration of the National Cultural Fund. The Administration of the National Cultural Fund is not responsible for the content of this project, nor for how the results of the project are used. These are entirely the responsibility of the organiser.