Kunsthaus Zürich hosts Switzerland’s first Solo Show of the Works of Mircea Cantor

Written by Kristin Stiener Thursday, 27 January 2011 23:03

Zurich, Switzerland - From 28 August to 8 November 2009, under the title ‘Tracking Happiness’, the Kunsthaus Zürich presents the young Romanian artist Mircea Cantor, whose work addresses traces left and deleted by our age of computer communication and electronic surveillance. With his videos, photos, objects and installations, Cantor puts the digital information society to the test in a remarkably poetic artistic process. The image of leaving a trace is fundamental for Cantor’s art. In ‘Tracking Happiness’ he considers a society that stores ever more personal information: biometric databases produce profiles, people’s locations and itineraries can be determined by mobile phone satellite, and credit and member's cards are scanned at the point of sale to collect information on consumer habits quickly and painlessly.

WITHOUT A TRACE
And yet, despite this proliferation of digitalized data on every possible activity, the process does not leave enduring traces, a phenomenon the artist addresses in the Kunsthaus exhibition. There is scarcely any traditional written record to remind future generations of the way we lived; nor is there likely to be, since e-mails, text messages, and entire digital databases are at permanent risk of deletion at the touch of a button or rollout of a new IT system.

In a video created especially for the exhibition, Cantor examines the ostensible paradox of an age in which traces are perpetually left and deleted. The concept of leaving a trace is central to the artist’s oeuvre as a whole. In a series of delicate, almost invisible gestures, Cantor infiltrates our everyday life, destabilizes familiar signs and symbols, and stages a reality of his own, one that is constantly in flux and virtually impossible to localize. In ‘Landscape is changing’ (2003), a small group of what seem to be demonstrators march on the streets of Tirana – only instead of the placards bearing political claims we have come to expect at such events, the participants carry mirrors, which reflect and fragment their surroundings and produce distorted images à la kaleidoscope. What are these people marching for? Are they confronting someone with his or her own reflection? Cantor offers no answers to these questions. There are as many interpretations of the trace left by this piece as there are observers.

With his work devoted to borders and their transgression, among other subjects, Cantor aims to perplex, in both the literal and the figurative sense. ‘Chaplet’ (2007), for example, appears to be barbed wire mounted on the museum wall. What viewed at a distance arouses memories of temporary borders or military roadblocks, however, on closer inspection turns out to be composed of the artist's own fingerprints. While Cantor is certainly playing, in this work as well as elsewhere, with the concept of control, registration, and the leaving of traces, the title of the piece (‘chaplet’ means ‘rosary’) proposes a new reading.

STATE POWER AND THE VOID
The ‘excision of significance’ and the void that makes room for new interpretations are recurring motifs in Cantor’s work. ‘All the Directions’, for instance, an early inkjet print from 2000, features the artist as hitch-hiker by the side of the road, showing passers-by a blank placard. Then there is the 16mm film ‘Shadow for a While’ (2007), in which a flag’s shadow is visible as the flag itself is burned: a striking image for the dissolution of ideologies and existing (national) communities, as experienced by Cantor himself, born in 1977 in Romania and today working in Paris. The artist also frequently addresses the structures of political and economic power, as for example in ‘Dimensions Variable’ (2009), an oversized riding crop composed of the flags of the G8 nations. The piece is a succinct comment on the global powers currently subjecting the world to their hegemony, and at the same time a virtually romantic aggregate of delicate substances allowing a host of interpretations.

VERSATILE ARTIST
Depending on the context, Cantor uses a range of media, including video, photography, objects and installations as well as more ephemeral forms, such as events or newspaper advertisements. And despite his youth, he has already amassed an impressive CV, including solo shows at the Camden Arts Centre (London) and the Centre Pompidou (Paris), at Washington’s Hirshhorn Museum and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and participation in key international events, such as Manifesta, the Berlin Biennial, and the São Paolo Biennial.

The Kunsthaus Zürich is hosting Cantor’s first solo show in Switzerland, curated by Mirjam Varadinis, who also invited the artist to take part in ‘Shifting Identities’, the group exhibition organized at the Kunsthaus in 2008. Cantor is creating several new works for the Kunsthaus show, among them two videos produced in collaboration with the Städtisches Museum Abteiberg in Mönchengladbach and the ‘Edition Bewegte Bilder’. The exhibition and Cantor’s oeuvre as a whole will be documented in an artist's book, available at the Kunsthaus shop. Supported by the Dr. Georg und Josi Guggenheim-Stiftung

GENERAL INFORMATION
Kunsthaus Zürich, Heimplatz 1, CH–8001 Zurich, www.kunsthaus.ch
Opening hours Sat, Sun, Tues 10 a.m.–6 p.m., Wed, Thurs, Fri 10 a.m.–8 p.m., closed on Mondays.
Admission CHF 14.- / concessions CHF 10.- (subject to change)
Magasins Fnac, tel. +33 1 4157 3212, www.fnac.ch .