15 Mar 2011

Mona Vatamanu & Florin Tudor at D+T Project, Brussels

MONA VATAMANU & FLORIN TUDOR
There will be hope
MARCH 18TH - MAY 7TH 2011
OPENING THURSDAY 17 MARCH 6 – 9 pm

D+T Project is pleased to announce their next exhibition 'There will be Hope', first solo exhibition in Belgium, by Mona Vatamanu and Florin Tudor.
Mona and Florin, living in Bucharest, are marked by the social and political situation of their country. They witnessed the switch from communism to neo-liberalism and testify the hope that came to replace disillusions, and fears from people facing the vague promises of an economic development brought by capitalism.

They mainly reveal what the recent history forgot .. the overall trauma caused by the social and economic shocks that followed the communism fall-over. Their work reflects - in a subtle and perceptive way - on the post-communist world.

Beyond their personal references, values, lives, their works also give echo to numerous political demonstrations from the past decades, to the people resistance against the governments in place, whether in Greece, Germany or also more recently in Egypt.
'There will be Hope' echoes the declaration of Asmaa Mahfouz the activist who started the Egyptian insurrection. Asmaa was celebrating her 26th birthday on Tuesday among tens of thousands of Egyptians as they took to the streets, parting with old fears in a bid to end President Hosni Mubarak’s three decades of authoritarian, single-party rule.

“As long as you say there is no hope, then there will be no hope, but if you go down and take a stance, then there will be hope.”
Asmaa Mahfouz

The exhibition will include paintings from the series that was started in 2007, 'Appointment with History', a display evolving around Deleuze, 2011, some collage, 2011 and the first screening of their new video 'Rite of Spring', 2010.

Their work was also presented in several exhibitions around the world :

Land Distribution, Lombard Freid Projects, New-York 2011 | Why do you resist ? Forms of resistance in contemporary, Arsenal Gallery, Bialystok | Open Archive#2, Argos, Brussels, 2010 | MUHKA, Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp, 2010 | Related Spaces, Ernst Museum, Budapest, 2010 | Dissolving Absolute Structures, Kunstverein Ludwigsburg, Germany, 2009 | All power to the imagination !, Secession, Vienna, 2009 | Mona Vatamanu and Florin Tudor, BAK basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht, Netherlands, 2009 | Blind Spots, Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien, Vienna, 2009 | 5th Berlin Biennial, Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin,2008 | On fiction and political imagination, Kadist Art Foundation, Paris, 2008 | Since we last spoke about monuments, Stroom Den Haag, The Hague, 2008 | Low-Budget Monuments, 52nd Venice Biennial, Romanian Pavilion, Venice, 2007.

During the D+T Project exhibition, videos will be shown at the Beurschouwburg from March 15 to March 26