“When I started recording events, back in the 1970s, I was not too much into theory; my relationship was in fact with technology. It exerted a kind of magnetism on me similar to that of the TV set, or to the vision provided by the camera obscura, or to looking through spy holes, or to voyeurism. It was leading to the same solitude and illusion of communication as the Internet platform of today. In the 1980s, my vision on this changed. I stopped being interested in the actual recording process, and developed an interest in living among others, in society, in finding my own place among people. My comeback in the 1990s made me finally think that performing in everyday life may be a dangerous thing to do, and so is improvising ad infinitum. […]
At the age of 45, after getting over the feeling of game over (of having lost in favour of the younger generations), I took it upon myself to give a voice to the past lived under a damned regime. As it happened, the works depicting the past proved to be acutely contemporary. Among other things, I displayed for instance the remnants of a broken piano, to stand as a visual accusation; or my notebooks from Dialogue with Comrade Ceausescu (a work from 1978 that I only showed after 1989). It was still very timely, as it was the time for the vast majority of people to develop a free political opinion.
I continued on with this in the exhibitions that followed. The result was that some works appeared so remote, on the visual level (not only time-wise), that they seemed to come from different authors. This gave me the liberty to escape categorisation. I was an artist who was discovered far too late to be labelled in a jar. Even when all invitations were persistently asking for works from the 1970s, I was sending the message that I was active and free. I certainly had to prove my works to be not dead but alive, contemporary, and actual.”
(Excerpts from the interview “Critical Resistance from Within”, Irina Cios in conversation with Ion Grigorescu, April 2011)
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