This exhibition ran from October 26 until November 16, 2024 at White Lamb in Sibiu, a space coordinated by artists Ștefan Radu Crețu and Lavinia Crețu.
During this period, I had three official openings: formal opening (October 26), second opening (November 2), and for the finissage (November 16) I organized a meeting with the members of the Ukrainian community in Sibiu.
This is the text that I wrote for the exhibition:
"24 February 2022. Russia invades Ukraine. From this dramatic point, when images of the war are constantly streamed in the media, artist Sorina Tomulețiu tries to imagine the war coming to an end. The past of her family of Bessarabian refugees recalls the painful reality of a recurrent invasion and the works in this exhibition are the result of two years of research and artistic work in this tumultuous context.
Using images and photos of the disaster as references for certain artworks presented in this exhibition, the artist amplifies the meaning that the war has. To ruin. To kill. To evacuate. To devastate. To break apart. As writer Susan Sontag declared in her book, Regarding the Pain of Others, “Photographs of the victims of war are themselves a species of rhetoric. They reiterate. They simplify. They agitate. They create the illusion of consensus.” (Sontag, 2) When we are bombarded with images of the war, there is a risk that we will become insensitive to what we are seeing. The artworks induce the dose of lyricism that would push this insensitivity into an area of the sublime in order to be transformed into empathy and in which “a cityscape is not made of flesh… Still, sheared-off buildings are almost as eloquent as bodies in the street.” (Sontag, 5)
This is a project that distills the energy of dramatic moments and that wishes to amplify the awareness of the urgency that the Russian invasion has created, reminding us that the war is not yet over and it is very close to us. The artist uses charcoal and a gestural way of representation which hints to the Art Informel movement of the 1940-1950. Alongside charcoal, the recycled cardboard applied directly on the canvas alludes to the aid packages that humanitarian organizations gather for those in need and makes you reflect on the constraint of having to pack a whole life lived into boxes to take refuge from the conflict.
Sorina’s artworks capture the moment of an indefinite impact, the fraction of a second in which matter is scattered in a violent and random manner. Her artistic input has consisted in the aesthetic defragmentation of the parts that make up a reality during wartime running parallel to a reality during peaceful times, which is increasingly becoming a minority reality at present. The difficulty consists in reconciling the contrast between the violence and uncertainty of the impact, on the one hand, and the re-composition of the resulting pieces, on the other. As viewers, we are invited to imagine peace together. “The landscape of devastation is still a landscape.” (Sontag, 65).”
Bibliography
Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, Penguin Books, 2004
Photos from the opening of the exhibition (October 26), photos by Gabriel Bogdan:
Photos from the second opening (November 2), photos by Camil Băncioiu:
Photos from the finissage (meeting with Ukrainians living in Sibiu) and with the artworks (November 16), photos by Gabriel Bogdan:
