Liliana Mercioiu-Popa is a visual artist who lives and works in Timișoara. She has distinguished herself at the 2015 and 2019 Art Encounters International Biennials and many national and international group exhibitions. She had a notable solo exhibition at MNAC Bucharest in 2020, and another one in the ISHO Pavilion in Timișoara in 2023, both of them revealing the multifaceted and amazing nature of her art. The poetics and/or politics of space related to various (collective or personal) historical contexts and the analysis of their present repercussions as expressions of evolvement, the micro and macro universes, the interactions between the various levels (multiple spatialities) of reality, as well as the perception of the tense subject-object interplay have been Mercioiu-Popa’s major interests in recent years.
Solo Exhibitions (Selection): 2023 The (guide) line, the (personal) trait and the point (of view), Curator Ami Barak, Pavilion Space - ISHO, Timisoara; 2020 Methods of Building, curator: Sandra Demetrescu MNAC Bucharest; 2014 - Variable Geometry, curator Ileana Pintilie, Jecza Gallery, Timişoara etc. Group Exhibitions (Selection): 2023 Expanded Nature Exhibition, curator Ileana Pintilie, Meta Spațiu, Timișoara; 2021 Invisible cities – Imaginary lands, curator Diana Marincu, Asociatia Contrasens, Comenduirea Garnizoanei, Timișoara.
Project description in English
The site-specific intervention, Con(-)Centric Spatialities, which I realized in the garden of the META gallery, in 2024, continues a series of temporary personal interventions in public space (initiated in 2015*), contributing to defining a mode of expression more highlighted in my own creation in recent years.
Configured as a spatial structure with large-scale architectural implications, it contains the transposition of iconic images from before the appearance of man on Earth (such as images of fossils) to the present day from the vast archive of the Internet, by laser engraving them onto the facets of the structure's embedded pillars, thus simultaneously homologating multiple levels of existence and eras of human evolution, and making visible a relationship to the world from the perspective of extended, anachronistic time. However, we only know a fraction of what nature knows and the ecosystems that have their home in it and that contain us, as well.
The two circles drawn by the layout of the pillars, which intersect, also enter the built space of the gallery, thus symbolically creating a kind of archive space (like DNA) of the multiple human experiences that could be discovered symultaneously through a multi-spatial and temporal displacement of the viewer, in freely accessing the visual landmarks that can reconnect science with the archeological (archaic) or magical levels.
I believe that remembering some cosmic ways of imagining the world and a just reporting of the human being on the spatial and temporal scale of one's own existence in relation to it can bring us multiple benefits in the existential plan in these troubled times of conflict and climate threats. Even if those disturbed ecosystems cry out to us in pain, we no longer know how to hear them.
Such personal reflections are also supported by the vibrant and ephemeral color shades of our personal journey, suggested in the installation by the chromatic perception that changes with each step (depending on the different colored faces of the pillars and the direction of the gaze).
The installation was part of the National Cultural Programme "Timisoara - European Capital of culture 2023" and is financed through GROW Programme funded by Center for Projects for the Timișoara Municipality with amounts allocated from the state budget, through the budget of the Ministry of Culture.
*This is about the text intervention WHAT ABOUT YOU?, 2015
