This exhibition brings together Iosif Kiràly and Doru Tulcan at Jecza Gallery aiming both a retrieval and a critical review. What's brought into focus is their artistic practice from a timespan pertaining to recent history (Zeitgeschichte): the '70s and '90s (alongside a number of significant extensions reaching to the beginnings of the 1990s). (Some of) The photographs shown had the the purpose of documenting the artistic experiments which often took place in unconventional spaces: actions, installations, performances. Thus, photography was the privileged tool for “recording traces”, becoming afterwards an effective instrument for creating the “layers of memory”. Critical review consists of the assumed dialogue between the image-document (rather small-size photographs, sometimes showing signs of decay, displayed in thematic and chronological groupings) and the big-size image – framed, consecrated as art object – nowadays naturally dominating the exhibition space.
The prevalent photographic evidences in the exhibition represent, in the end, a means of activating the remembrance of those frenetic artistic experiments, deeply innovative and inevitably marginalized. Their purpose is – as Georges Bataille once stated – to induce unrest and not delectation in the viewer; their substance is, after all, that of a critical image, such as Didi-Huberman defined it: an image criticizing our way of seeing in order to determine us, by looking at us, to really see it.
