At the Mirror

Video (colour, sound), 11min., 2013-ongoing.
Each new presentation of the video is a recording of the previous one.

At the Mirror portrays a girl’s first steps into womanhood; her coming-of-age is already unfolding, and the camera seemingly captures the moment she becomes aware of it, in front of the mirror. By looking straight into the camera, the young woman sees her present self in the mirror, but she also sees herself in an uncertain future – and, voyeuristically, she also sees the viewer who exists in the same future time. The universe depicted is inspired by Romanian folklore: the protagonist is wearing a high-neck, puff-sleeved dress and is timidly singing the song “La Oglindă” (“At the Mirror”), with lyrics by George Coșbuc and Angela Moldovan’s folkish melody, while plaiting her hair into braids that she pins around her head. But the story takes an unexpected turn: having perfected the traditional hairdo, the young woman starts cutting her hair, which gives her appearance a modern touch and creates an anachronic fracture in the freshly evoked universe. With her new updo and her red lips, the girl’s previously innocent face develops a sensual aura. But this adolescent fantasy does not go beyond self-sufficiency. Her delight, pride, shyness and obedience, her fear of her mother and the other mixed feelings she experiences are contained in a suspended, solitary space. Even her mother’s interdiction against using the mirror underlines this: the mother intuits a change in her daughter, which is to take place through her own gaze and no one else’s.

The subject of this piece – the image of the woman and the idea of remembering a bygone self – also determined its fluid shape: each new exhibition of the artwork is a video of its previous projection. Thus, the visual component of At the Mirror deteriorates with the passage of time, becoming increasingly unclear and blurred, until it will be a completely white frame, accompanied by the homonymous song.

Since it’s dependent on the art distribution circuit, the artwork’s transformation is relative to the degree of its demand: the more it is shown, the faster it will degrade, which turns the erasure (of the image of the self) into the price paid for success, so to speak. While in the context of the capitalist market, success means higher visibility for my name as an artist, my body faces the opposite situation: in a social context, it loses visibility as I age. I must admit this thought did not cross my mind when I made the piece. Back then, I was concerned with finding a way to adapt the format of the work to its subject: the memory of a past self and the development of this memory through time, memory as a self-portrait that is subject to the passage of time, and the way it survives and fictionalises (itself). Accordingly, once its discernible visual content disappears, the artwork will eventually return to the fiction that served as its initial inspiration: a song that a young woman sings to herself, a last indulgence.

Part of:
Good Girls. Memory, Desire, Power, National Museum of Contemporary Art Bucharest
june-october 2013

DISKURS Festival Giessen
november 2014

Bucharest Experimental Film Festival BIEFF
march, 2016

Keep Forgetting to Foget Me, Spinnerei Leipzig
april-may 2019