Claudiu Ciobanu | Memento vivere, Romanian Cultural Institute in Vienna

Memento Vivere discusses the implications of the posthuman condition and how technology affects our lives, presenting the perspective of artist Claudiu Ciobanu in which contemporary painting can be used to explore posthumanist philosophy. In the current post-pandemic context, an exhibition project exploring posthumanism through contemporary painting can offer a powerful and stimulating way to actively address this subject and encourage reflection on the ways technology transforms our understanding of what it means to be human.

The artist Claudiu Ciobanu addresses themes such as blurring the boundaries between the physical and digital, the impact of technology on our cognitive abilities, and the ethical implications of technological advancements in everyday life. Through a central character, a child, the artist creates a utopian journey into a possible future of humanity. The child symbolizes the future and carries forward the legacy we leave as humanity. Through his paintings, he creates a space for these conversations that are no longer purely imaginary but can actually be felt in our lives, observing how technology increasingly dominates and transforms much of what we do daily, using not only digital tools but also, more recently, artificial intelligence.

Posthumanism focuses on ethical questions related to the use and control of technology and its impact on society. The pandemic has highlighted the relevance of these questions, especially regarding aspects such as how human life is shaped by technology. With little effort, it has become natural for work to be conducted online, for education to be through a screen, and even sports to be done remotely. As technology use continues to expand and evolve, posthumanist philosophy can offer valuable insights for addressing these ethical concerns and observing whether technology is being used in ways that genuinely consider human well-being. It is clear that posthumanist philosophy has become relevant in contemporary society, a fact anticipated by researchers like Rosi Braidotti who has been addressing this subject analytically and not utopically since the early 2000s. However, posthumanism has transcended the boundaries of philosophy and is increasingly found in visual arts in critical, utopian, provocative, or imaginative situations.

The artist speaks about relationships in the given context and communication, referring to the intersection between technology and language. In contemporary art, text-based elements are used to criticize how technology has changed the way we communicate and access information. Artists refer to technology as a way to change thinking and information processing and their impact on our abilities to understand the surrounding world.

Claudiu Ciobanu transforms the idea of communication from text to gesture, and this is reflected in the only work with two characters from the exhibition - the mother and daughter. Through the simple gesture of a maternal embrace, the artist captures a profound ancestral communication that can never be replaced by technology. Communication through touch and the experience of closeness to the other is what makes you want to live, to remember to feel - Memento vivere.

Curator, Cristiana Ursache

Claudiu Ciobanu | Solaris, Artep Gallery, Iasi

If in Lem's novel, Solaris, the fictional living planet was capable of telepathically communicating with space explorers and probing their unconscious, in the current exhibition, it becomes a screen capable of reflecting the artist's fears and uncertainties faced with an uncertain planetary future. What is the future of humanity? In what kind of social organization will the children of the coming decades live? What can we learn from the recent history of our anthropogenic footprint on nature?

The images of the fierce competition for cosmic colonization recently waged by tech giants Space X and Blue Origin, owned by multi-billionaires Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, have brought back to public attention the theme of the "space race" specific to the 1960s, intensely romanticized by popular culture. By proposing colonies on Mars or in space orbit, the space program developed by these private companies evokes both the subsuming of humanity's survival ideals to a cynical capitalist rationality, governed by the value of profit, and the futility of these endeavors as an alternative to the ongoing climate catastrophe unfolding before our eyes.

Although the space race between the Soviet Union and the United States, the two superpowers of the Cold War era, was primarily aimed at the development of orbital satellites, interplanetary travel, and especially moon landing, space colonization remained secondary in the space programs developed by NASA and the Soviet Space Program.

The evocation of this colonial imaginary in the Solaris exhibition, presented at Artep Gallery, proposes a narrative fiction set in a post-apocalyptic future, where the forced colonization of space, becoming the only option for a devastated planet in search of a "Planet B," faces the inherent limitations of a socio-economic and political thinking captive to extractive capitalism, largely responsible for climate change.

The exhibition borrows not only the title but also some literary and visual motifs from Stanislav Lem's eponymous novel, as well as its adaptation by director Andrei Tarkovsky.

These borrowings are filtered through a personal exercise of cultural archaeology of the science-fiction imaginary adapted to become an instrument of existential analysis of an imminent planetary catastrophe. Thus, Claudiu Ciobanu stages in a non-linear dramaturgy the encounter of anonymous space explorers and settlers with the planet-organism from Lem's novel. In the paintings of this series, made in a technique close to painterly photorealism, the motif of modernist architecture in ruins, overrun by lush, uncontrollable vegetation, establishes a stable scenographic reference, ambiguously situating the protagonists in perpetual waiting. In an exercise of imagination mediated by digital technology, one of these characters becomes the subject of an augmented reality experiment, momentarily leaving the static presence that characterizes these characters, absorbed in meditative activities.

If in Lem's novel, Solaris, the fictional living planet was capable of telepathically communicating with space explorers and probing their unconscious, in the current exhibition, it becomes a screen capable of reflecting the artist's fears and uncertainties faced with an uncertain planetary future. What is the future of humanity? In what kind of social organization will the children of the coming decades live? What can we learn from the recent history of our anthropogenic footprint on nature?

Curator, Cristian Nae