I swim through the colours of my grief | group show

Name: I swim through the colours of my grief | group show
Start: 2025-01-31T18:00:00+02:00
End: 2025-01-31T21:00:00+02:00
Location: Albert Einstein 6, 400045 Cluj-Napoca, Romania

Schedule

Fri Jan 31 2025 at 06:00 pm to 09:00 pm

UTC+02:00

Location

Albert Einstein 6, 400045 Cluj-Napoca, Romania | Cluj-napoca, CJ

Lena Ciobanu, Daria Gizdavu, Ioana Rusu
curator: Timea Toth
from 31.01 - 07.03 2025
At first, it’s harder. Way harder actually. Just as if your heart’s in
chains – very heavy and full of grief. I know that pain is meant to be a part of life, but nothing prepares you for it, not even your past experiences (which were not at all as painful). I can’t turn back time, and I think that’s what hurts the most. […] At the end of the day, I need to take care of myself, and for this I can’t let the past and every tiny obstacle bring me down.
- Excerpt from a diary made after a break-up

“I swim through the colours of my grief” is an exhibition that explores the tumultuous road that follows a heartbreak, illustrating each of the seven stages of grief: shock, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, testing, and acceptance. Just like in a puzzle, photographs representing moments of loneliness, bitterness, confusion, but also serenity and bliss, are embellished with shades of blue and red, symbolizing both love and anger – two feelings that start to look alike in our journey of recovery.
Each of the three artists present in this exhibition manage to capture in their works the aching beauty of a relationship’s last breaths – the aftermath of the break-up, when we go from blaming ourselves to realizing that we’ve been living in a fantasy all this time. Lena Ciobanu’s black and white pinholes show us a restricted vision, tiny moments in time where we seem to be nothing but spirits that haunt ourselves. Her seaside pictures,
on the other hand, where the peaceful blue landscape is suddenly
interrupted with a red element – the ladder – can only make us ponder on the persistence of love in our lives, but also on how the shifting of the waves can also mean the shifting of our own perception of life.
Colder tones, blurry lights, foggy thoughts – Daria Gizdavu’s works, mostly devoid of people, remind us just how overwhelming the feeling of loneliness can be during this time, and how our thoughts and feelings seem to be thrown into the void. Light represents a main character in Gizdavu’s pictures, symbolizing both the act of missing someone from your past and, most importantly, a source of faith and hope for the future. Last, but
certainly not least, Ioana Rusu’s aquarium ensemble outlines the constant battle of trying to get out of your current state, even though bits and pieces of your former partner (or the idea of them) still remain in your mind. In another series made by Rusu, a brutal red engulfs a shadowy figure, demonstrating, yet again, that love and anger are never too far apart.
In the end, recovery is, most of the time, a bumpy road, and while we may not go through these 7 stages in the same order, what’s important is that the last one is the same – acceptance.
Text by Timea Toth

Lena Ciobanu uses art as an intuitive discovery of the world and she lets the space guide her, a process without destination or initial goal, which creates a mental map and from which she starts her creative process. She is intrigued by people and the mythical spaces that are created around them, and their way of interacting with themselves and the world, living in communities, analysing their dreams, symbols and ideas. Her mediums of expression merge into each other – photography,
archive, cine-verites, textile, installations.
Daria Gizdavu is a photographer and filmmaker based in Cluj-Napoca. She thinks in images, loves to explore the unseen or ignored, makes lists of odd places and photographs the feelings she wants to remember. Although her background is in Cinematography, her preferred medium of expression has always been photography - it’s her way of introspection and of capturing the ephemeral moments which we often tend to ignore.
Ioana Rusu’s practice is experimental, primarily based on
collage and post photography which, through fragmentation and
recontextualization, turn into specifics that migrate into video or installation. The human mind and all it entails, the real and the imagined, has become her desired subject through which she constructs her narrative of making sense of the world. She focuses on sensibility and the subjectivity of experience, and she deals with the challenge of captivating vulnerability. Another aspect of her practice is bringing personal experiences out into the open and placing them in the larger social context.
Timea Toth is a PhD student at the doctoral school “History.
Civilization. Culture” (UBB, Cluj-Napoca). The main topic of her thesis is the evolution of art photography in contemporary Romania, with an accent on the artist-photographer themselves. As a lover of art and photography in general, her desire is to help further popularize art photography in the Romanian space.