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Auto-da-FĂŠ Ciprian Muresan

A few pages from Elias Canetti’s

space. But by painstakingly recom-

‘Die Blendung’/ ‘Auto-da-Fé’(1932)

posing the text from its scattered bits,

are grafittoed on walls throughout

Ciprian Muresan also engages the

the cities of Romania.

transition between modernism and its

The text acquires a monumental quali-

post-modernities as a historical point

ty, while the processes of subjective

where the monumental needs to be

dissolution it describes are embedded

re-evaluated. Between the detritus of

into the monumental. The resonance

modernism and post-modern equivoca-

of each sentence, its persistent attempts

tion, Muresan’s ambivalent monument

to locate and rearrange the flotsam

to Canetti, to alienating spaces and to

of a disintegrating subjectivity, are set

the capacity of speech of defining and

against the immobility of walls and

holding together a subjectivity, embo-

enclosures. The rambling monologue

dies the experience of those evacuated,

that Canetti’s protagonist addresses to

dispossessed of their right to the city

his library has been interpreted by liter-

and pushed to the very margins of

ary critics as a significant document of

social life.

the ‘end of modernism’, shattered utopias and fragmented beliefs. The artist’s Mihnea Mircan, 2008 strategy of dispersing the text replicates to an extent the destructive acceleration written by Canetti into modern urban

Auto-da-fĂŠ A project by Ciprian Muresan, 2008 Andreiana Mihail Gallery Directors: Andreiana Mihail and Mihai Nicodim Address: Str. Pandele Tarusanu 4 bis 011085 Bucharest, Romania www.andreianamihail.com info@andreianamihail.com Project assistants Catalin Ilie Stefan Tiron Authors Irlo, p.n.e.a. & Masi, Pierre le Venerable, Neuro, Mimi, Akira, Misionarul no limits, Silve, Catalin Ilie, Cristian Rusu, Irina Bako, Quincy, Cristina David, Raluca Barb, Octavian Rusu, Ovidiu Anton, Teresa Novotny, Phillip Hohenwarter, Julia Hohenwarter, Anna Witt, Diana Duta, Madalina Zaharia, Mircea Cantor Thanks to Mihnea Mircan, Adrian Notz, Cabaret Voltaire, Serban Ursachi, Aura & Sanda Dragulin, Tim Nadasan Eduard Constantin, Serban Savu, Misa, Raymond Bobar Design andrews:degen, Amsterdam www.andrewsdegen.com Distribution Andreiana Mihail Gallery, Bucharest Kontainer, Los Angeles Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich