“The world in which we live is so diverse. You really can’t say we had no choice,” says Anca Munteanu Rimnic while walking back and forth through the exhibition space in her tap shoes. How do art works function in their different dimensions and relations? How do they set themselves apart from others, as well as from the exhibition space? These circular movements inscribe themselves into the presentation of the works.
In Munteanu Rimnic’s work motives and media differ from each other remarkably. They connect as if following a secret logic, regardless of typical attributions concerning their respective sources. Photography, video and sound works, various objects—found or produced by the artist—form an open, instable system. Some works appear to be variable, their correlations negotiable, others are combined to form new constellations and works on site.
Born in Romania and raised in Germany, Anca Munteanu Rimnic investigates the fluid entity that is identity. She is not merely searching for traces, but rather develops new ideas that accumulate unlocatability and strangeness. Identity and exhibition–both being mutable, ambivalent structures–are being used and questioned less in the sense of an artistic productivity, but rather in favor of a playful, conceptual approach. Although the category of playfulness is terminologically problematic, spawned by the critique of authenticity in the last decades, it describes Munteanu Rimnic’s intuitive accumulation of objects quite well. In immediate, daily forms and situations she finds allegorical or visual references and develops them further. Many things can be of interest: blocks of salt, old carpets, stitchery, leather whips, a dancing body, the clacking noise of tap shoes, scattered millstones. Presented next to carefully composed photography, one could argue that these are still lives of sensitivities, but they have a tangible presence that exceeds description. Focusing on the curiosities and the independent existences of the objects, the view suggests an animistic reading.
–Gergana Todorova
Anca Munteanu Rimnic
PSM Gallery, www.psm–gallery.com, office@psm-gallery.com