A Glimpse of Disconnection
Romania Culture Day: "A Glimpse of Disconnection" Dani Ghercă Art Exhibition & Acoustic - Electronic Concert by Mischa Blanos
January 13th to 29th, 2024
On Saturday, January 13th, the Choi Centre · CloudHouse commenced the opening of the exhibition. The Romanian Cultural Institute in Beijing had the honor of inviting Dani Ghercă for "A Glimpse of Disconnection," an urban photography visual-art exhibition, and Mischa Blanos for a neoclassical music concert, all to commemorate Romania's National Culture Day.
The exhibition "A Glimpse of Disconnection" addresses sweeping changes in human condition, highlighting alienation and confusion generated by digital life and radical individualism. The images depict the city in a cold light, reduced to data, providing an illusion of connectivity and projecting deepfake dreams. The exhibition proposal includes 15 new works printed on immense pannels, created by Dani Ghercă in the USA and China from 2020 till present, that will be displayed in various areas of the Choi Center, offering the audience a captivating and immersive journey into contemporary Romanian culture.
Dani Ghercă (1988, Bucharest) uses photography to examine the notion of urbanity, scale, and disconnection. In his photographic quest, he aims to transmit a feeling of confusion, awe, and claustrophobia onto the viewer. For "A Glimpse of Disconnection", Ghercă makes aerial views of different metropolises around the world. He takes these pictures from a helicopter, twisting our perspective and leaving behind all possible points of reference. By doing so, he reduces the city to an abstract play of form, colour and light. The pictures are not taken at night - as the almost pitch- black compositions would suggest – but during the day, against the sunlight. The shiny elements in the composition are the reflections from metal elements on the roofs and facades.
This dense network of lines and surfaces does not coincidentally evoke the shape of a gigantic motherboard. Hence, Ghercă’s pictures become a visual representation of the interconnected metropolis and life in the age of digital communication, whose promise of connectivity and constant availability paradoxically often leads to feelings of loneliness and alienation.
In this project Dani Ghercă aims to create the last metaphor of globalization, an atlas of the world's most important cities that resembling computer motherboards, this element that is controlling the existence of humanity, in an excessive way, in the 21st century.
Dani Ghercă (1988, Bucharest)
Dani Ghercă is one of the most prominent Romanian visual artists, who belongs to an emerging generation that uses the medium of photography in a conceptual way. He studied photography at the National University of Arts Bucharest. His work has been widely exhibited: Museo ICO Madrid, Tate Exchange Liverpool, ESSL Museum Vienna, MNAC Bucharest, HISK, Brussels, Sonsbeek Arnhem. His work is part of various private and corporate collections, including ING Amsterdam, Proximus Art Collection etc. He is one of the driving forces behind SwitchLab, a project-based space for visual arts in Bucharest.
Mischa Blanos
The exhibition was also accompanied by neoclassical music, specially composed for this project by the prodigious Romanian musician, Mischa Blanos, who performed at the opening ceremony.
Mischa Blanos, a prodigious Romanian Neo-classical pianist and composer, constantly pushes the boundaries of sound. Using the piano as an innovative instrument, he collaborates with synthesizers, incorporates organic grooves, and presents surprising musical arrangements. With notable releases like "Second Nature" and "Indoors," and his debut album, "City Jungle," Blanos metaphorically explores the urban landscape and reflects on the pandemic's impact on culture and social life. Blanos will showcase a series of specially crafted musical compositions, created exclusively for this project, that will play continuously throughout the exhibition.
The exhibition is curated by Xinduo Li, senior lecturer at Beijing Jiaotong University, Faculty of Architecture and Art, his main research focusing on contemporary art theory and digital media art theory. "Through this series of works, Dani Gherca sketches for us a futuristic vision of the digital city, where intersecting networks and digital fragments firmly entrap us. Just as Guy Debord depicted in "The Society of the Spectacle," we are surrounded by landscapes, but instead of natural ones, we face the digiscapes."
Image courtesy of Choi Centre · Cloud House
