CURATOR’S STATEMENT

To what extent are we willing to accept that the object of artistic production can consist of self-questioning? How can the exploration of its own conditions of existence and the mechanisms that legitimize, regulate, and define the journey from concept to artistic object as the terminus of the creative process be presented within the conventional frameworks of an art exhibition? How tedious is such an endeavor of rigorous analysis of the sculptural medium—and how dull does the game become within these conventions once they are identified and understood? To what extent can we falsify, in the digital age, artistic and curatorial identity, and what limitations are imposed on artistic productions in which the mediators of artistic information become themselves subjects of the artistic discourse—a discourse that thus seeks to reclaim its capacity for agency and autonomy from an authorial perspective? 

The laboratory exhibition proposed by Mihai Savin brings together the systematic reflections conducted over three years of doctoral research on the contemporary condition of the sculptural medium and object and, more broadly, of art as a theoretical object. His approach is post-conceptual, meta-artistic, and self-reflexive, drawing from the lineage of analytical philosophy and Kantian-style systematic inquiry into the limits of artistic language, the artistic categories commonly employed in the contemporary art world, and the conditions of possibility for the production of an artistic phenomenon. For Savin, the phrase “artistic research” is understood as a process through which theoretical hypotheses regarding the ontological possibility of legitimizing and actualizing authorial intentions are tested. Artistic projects become exemplifications of potentialities for asserting, performing, documenting, and storing artistic information. This artistic research project reflects on the dominant artistic conventions inherited from modernism and postmodernism, as well as the ontological, ethical, and epistemic conditions under which doctoral artistic research presents itself and self-legitimizes publicly. 

Persistently, Mihai Savin rigorously and systematically pursues the expansion of the sculptural medium by defining it in relation to the notion of information, the history of the medium and its materiality, and various mediators of artistic information. These mediators include critical and curatorial texts, the artist statement, the physical and discursive limits of institutional spaces versus public spaces, and the possibilities for interpretive reception and legitimization of the artistic proposal by the audience. Furthermore, the existence of the artistic object in the digital age becomes a major focus of his practice, which can be categorized as “superfictive art,” incorporating simulation (of the rules of the artistic game) and artistic hoax—embraced in the post-Duchampian tradition. 

According to this perspective, the audience itself is understood as an anti- or para-user, as the artist proposes distancing both the everyday object and the artistic proposal as a theoretical object from the utilitarian paradigm often associated with audience behavior in contemporary society. Holistically, the notion of accident in the production process (associated with chance in the Dadaist tradition) is central to his artistic approach. This often involves simulating conditions for (re)producing and receiving extended sculptural projects that move from the object-based medium into the realm of communication and legitimization specific to the art world as an autonomous social system, yet one connected to other cultural and scientific fields. The exhibited projects, therefore, test the permeability of the contemporary art world and, not least, the limits of the academic space in which they are situated.

CRISTIAN NAE