CUTS, installation & video 03:08 min, 2018

Adelina Ivan’s statement gestures to cut through an artificial bear skin are meant to annihilate the role of a hunter. The beast is not captured, the fur is not snatched off the back of the would-be bear. A tailor’s pair of scissors are cutting around a pattern to simulate the bear-skin as a trophy. Yet through Adelina Ivan’s hypnotizing gestures, there is no violence preceding the act, the tradition is hollow. The only remnant of the hunting custom is the skin-pattern that the artist uses to shape the material.
At the end sequence of the video, after the artificial skin is cut, the artist does not hang it on the wall, as a hunting prize. She imitates the outspread shape of the object, in a reverse anthropomorphising performance. Instead of wearing or displaying the bear-fur, the human body becomes it, in a rescue performative gesture that underlines the absurdity of the practice.

 not everything means something, honey (vol.2)

Adelina Ivan's video installation delimits an immersive demarche into a universe of feminine dreams, school uniforms and girlhood pathos. Though her girl characters are trapped in a world on the verge of collapse, entrapped in social restrictions, they nonetheless try to put aside their fair share of triumph.

The moment Atena steps out of the line is arrested through conceptualization. Atena's simple tying of her sportshoe sets up to redefine the meaning of freedom. The gesture is both a performance and a historic intervention without being explicitly demonstrative. By means of reapprropiating the grace and dignity of Greek kinetic female statues her video re-enacts one of the famous postures of Athena- the unimpeded, bending over her leg in order to tie her sandal. Atena opts out of the line. She is all strength and renewed power. She allows herself a moment of respite. The natural, unschooled gesture gets to heavily contrast with the artificial of the situation and the power structures that generates it. A gym lesson in 1988 is a spectacle of young, healthy, athletic bodies onto which the world is eager to plow and inseminate its contagious forms of authority. The girls move rhythmically their anonymous limbs forming clockwork. Atena's self-composure and witty disobedience is disarming. Radically ambiguous in meaning and intentions, Atena's gesture intervenes upon the hollowness and disingenuousness of both the situation and the false naturalness of the choreographed moment.

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Adelina Ivan