56. Biennale – Padiglione romeno

Il progetto Inventing the Truth. On Fiction and Reality rappresenta la Romania alla 56. Biennale di Venezia

Comunicato stampa

The exhibition Inventing the Truth. On Fiction and Reality reflects on the possibilities of fiction as an instrument for understanding the world and for shaping the present. Blurring the line between fiction and reality allows us to articulate creative hypotheses about both past and present, thus activating a new relation between what is and what could be.

The artists' works highlight both the process of interpretation and the intricacies of producing a story. The visual construction of each project uses the conventions of fiction, even while developing around a documentary core, with an eye to revealing the subtle “sutures” which bind the actual to the imagined. The impossibility to identify where reality ends and where the story starts compels the viewer to vacillate between how convincing and how jarring the staging is.

Carmen Dobre-Hametner's photographic project approaches the extreme experience of discovering history as real life by means of reenactment.
Ștefan Sava proposes a video essay on the potential of, and limits to, interpreting a personal photographic archive, questioning the representation of a traumatic past. Larisa Sitar's project speaks about exchanges between ideology and history and proposes a new vision of the “garden of disorder”, by appropriating differently dated engravings that depict violence, ruin and anonymous characters who influenced the course of humanity. Michele Bressan uses the temporal misplacement of an event, rendering it more abstract and suspending it outside chronological conventions. Lea Rasovszky puts together a story from fragments of real events, personal memories and excerpts from books, integrating fiction into the narrator's life. Alex Mirutziu uses the concepts of “bureaucratic object” and “ontological design” in the relations he establishes between word and space, body and object.