Keep Forgetting to Forget Me

Curator: Anja Lückenkemper
Spinnerei Leipzig, 2019

Shrill neon-colored curtains mark the entrance to the exhibition space. They form a threshold and clear visual demarcation between what is outside — an objective reality we all seem to agree upon — and the interior, where subjectivities multiply: Pushing through the curtains, we find ourselves in the dark limbo of Larisa Crunțeanu’s latest exhibition tale. It is a tale composed of various narratives that are at the same time complementary and conflicting: subjective imaginations musing on the idea of contemporary female identities.

The neon color greeting visitors stands in direct contradiction to the dusky aesthetics of the interior space and the works collected here, which evoke visual and musical language of Romanian folklore or show rural landscapes. The women who populate this space are never clearly identifiable. They are transforming, developing or disintegrating, are camouflaged, or exist only as a trail, an empty hollow where once there was a hand performing a gesture. They are each in a state of flux, either a becoming or a having-been, but never present in a solid, realized state of being. Crunțeanu creates a moment of haziness, of ambiguity and vagueness. The exhibition space is no longer a physical place, but turned into a state of consciousness — sombre, hovering between darkness and light, alternating between humor, craziness, ennui and self-pity.

70 years ago Simone de Beauvoir wrote in her seminal book Le Deuxième Sexe „On ne nait pas une femme, on le devient [en: One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman].“ Women, de Beauvoir states, have been turned into “the other” by men. Man is posited as the absolute, the subject, while woman is assigned the role of the other, the object. SHE is always defined depending on a HE and thus struggling with an existential conflict: embracing a passive “feminine” role or her own agency. A similar feeling of alienation is tangible in Larisa Crunțeanu’s exhibition Keep Forgetting to Forget Me. Female identity is something that doesn’t come natural, but needs to be tested, rehearsed and performed. This is the artist’s way of looking, navigating and imagining (future) conditions of life through a feminist lens. She has turned the exhibition into a space where common boundaries are being re-negotiated: a place of indefinability and brittle identities, where even skin, the first boundary between oneself and the external world, seems permeable.