Europe
Ciprian Muresan
I'm Protesting Against Myself
2011
Ciprian Muresan, I'm Protesting Against Myself, 2011. Video.
The video I’m Protesting Against Myself by Ciprian Muresan, and co-authored by Gianina Carbunariu), presents a puppet in a garbage can, citing numerous reasons why one should protest against it. Ciprian Muresan utilizes the comic effects typical of popular culture and the media. Progressively during the video, one appropriates the reasons for this character’s discontent. This work has particular resonance at the moment in the midst of globalization and Capitalist excesses since indignant voices are rising. The project is done in collaboration with Gianina Carbunariu, a contemporary Romanian author and stage director who also wrote the script.
Ciprian Muresan appropriates historical, political, social and cultural (essentially artistic, literary and cinematographic) references which he re-contextualizes. He analyzes the mechanisms de diffusion of culture, the ambivalent relations between the memory of recent history and the experience of current realities, as well as the relations between political power, religious power and civil society. With simple gestures, themes and methods borrowed from popular culture, he tackles art in an expiatory manner, returning importance to personal expression and experience. Ciprian Muresan belongs to the generation after the fall of the former Communist regime who deal the aftermath of political and social history of his country, in a post-conceptual mode, without necessarily inscribing it within the traditional East/West opposition. Instead, on the contrary, he approaches this history as an integral part of a larger whole, and is interested in questions linked to the disturbances in contemporary society following the declining of Modernist utopias and in the impact of new technologies on our visual culture.
Ciprian Muresan was born in 1977 in Cluj, Romania. He lives and works in Cluj, Romania.