Auto-da-FĂŠ Ciprian Muresan
A few pages from Elias Canetti’s
space. But by painstakingly recom-
‘Die Blendung’/ ‘Auto-da-Fé’(1932)
posing the text from its scattered bits,
are grafittoed on walls throughout
Ciprian Muresan also engages the
the cities of Romania.
transition between modernism and its
The text acquires a monumental quali-
post-modernities as a historical point
ty, while the processes of subjective
where the monumental needs to be
dissolution it describes are embedded
re-evaluated. Between the detritus of
into the monumental. The resonance
modernism and post-modern equivoca-
of each sentence, its persistent attempts
tion, Muresan’s ambivalent monument
to locate and rearrange the flotsam
to Canetti, to alienating spaces and to
of a disintegrating subjectivity, are set
the capacity of speech of defining and
against the immobility of walls and
holding together a subjectivity, embo-
enclosures. The rambling monologue
dies the experience of those evacuated,
that Canetti’s protagonist addresses to
dispossessed of their right to the city
his library has been interpreted by liter-
and pushed to the very margins of
ary critics as a significant document of
social life.
the ‘end of modernism’, shattered utopias and fragmented beliefs. The artist’s Mihnea Mircan, 2008 strategy of dispersing the text replicates to an extent the destructive acceleration written by Canetti into modern urban
Auto-da-fĂŠ A project by Ciprian Muresan, 2008 Andreiana Mihail Gallery Directors: Andreiana Mihail and Mihai Nicodim Address: Str. Pandele Tarusanu 4 bis 011085 Bucharest, Romania www.andreianamihail.com info@andreianamihail.com Project assistants Catalin Ilie Stefan Tiron Authors Irlo, p.n.e.a. & Masi, Pierre le Venerable, Neuro, Mimi, Akira, Misionarul no limits, Silve, Catalin Ilie, Cristian Rusu, Irina Bako, Quincy, Cristina David, Raluca Barb, Octavian Rusu, Ovidiu Anton, Teresa Novotny, Phillip Hohenwarter, Julia Hohenwarter, Anna Witt, Diana Duta, Madalina Zaharia, Mircea Cantor Thanks to Mihnea Mircan, Adrian Notz, Cabaret Voltaire, Serban Ursachi, Aura & Sanda Dragulin, Tim Nadasan Eduard Constantin, Serban Savu, Misa, Raymond Bobar Design andrews:degen, Amsterdam www.andrewsdegen.com Distribution Andreiana Mihail Gallery, Bucharest Kontainer, Los Angeles Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich