Larisa Sitar was likewise present in the Harlan Levey Projects exhibition, although incidentally, collaborating with Michele Bressan on the Generation Loss (2019) video – an extended still shot of the notorious People’s House, the second biggest administrative building in the world. It was a megalomaniacal project of dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu (1918-1989) which required the leveling of roughly 40.000 houses in Bucharest’s historic districts. The imprint it left, however, is not just architectural, as the trauma still collectively lingers between the city’s inhabitants to this day. Bressan and Sitar filmed the work twenty years after the revolution and copied the material on a VCR overriding it twenty times (again) until the image was glitched out, barely recognizable. The work thus eloquently illustrates difficulties Romania has in processing its own history, often enveloped in vagueness, overriding narratives and brutality.

One of the numerous side effects the transition period invited was the disappearance of most cinema halls spread throughout the country. Some were run-down, some destroyed, but the majority were simply repurposed into more profitable or easy to maintain businesses, leaving few other options for viewers other than mall multiplexes. In his “Waiting for the Drama” (2010) series, Michele Bressan photographed many of the only 29 state cinemas left at the time. He opted to point his camera not towards the screen, but towards the rows of empty seats, waiting indefinitely to be filled. The implication encouraged by the title lets timeframes overlap, as the images give hints of halls aesthetically stuck in the past (1970s and 1980s) waiting for an implausible future. Bressan accurately identifies another symbol of transition with his “RABLA” series (2011 – 2013). In 2005 Romania launched an ambitious programme with the goal of modernizing the cars running on its streets. Owners of cars that were older than ten years could exchange their vehicle for a voucher in order to purchase a new one. A vast majority of these were Dacias built in the 1970s and 1980s, which at the time was the only available option for most of the populace. Bressan toured several REMAT centers, witnessing the transformation of Dacia cars, once a supposed source of national pride, into abstract heaps of scrap metal.

In the middle of the Harlan Levey space Dani Ghercă brought works from his ongoing “A Glimpse of Disconnection”, in the striking sculptural presence by now characteristic of the series – sporting Diasec prints encapsulated in thick rectangular panels. For the project he took aerial shots of various cities embodying the Metropolis (technology ridden urban agglomerations having millions of inhabitants), but takes care in underexposing the photograph so locations are unidentifiable. This technique, together with some minor post-processing, leaves scarce details beside the buildings’ hard edges, reflecting elements and rooftops. The resulting images are filled with abstract geometric patterns and, quite strikingly, more akin to circuit boards than urban landscapes, providing a chilling view on contemporary life, where humanity transforms in mere sources of (big) data. Ghercă likewise brought his House of the Free Press work from the “4 Houses” series (2015-2016). In it the artist displays his inclination for scrutinising relations between architecture, scale, and power by showcasing four imposing Soviet-era buildings which once stood as symbols of pride during the communist era. Ghercă’s deadpan photographs captured frontally unveil the still lingering dominance of the structures over their urban environment and institutional discourse.

Back in 2004 Nicu Ilfoveanu developed two pictures left on a film in an old box-camera gifted to him, thus revealing latent images which up until then were stuck in limbo for aproximately fifty years. This led him to the ”Steampunk Autochrome” (2004-2008) series, included in the Brussels exhibition. The title is a clear reference to the Steampunk aesthetic romanticizing the industrial revolution (and its ruins) and to the autochrome developing process that enabled the first color photographs. The project is one of the most recognizable and distinct endeavors in recent Romanian photography. While most of his contemporaries resorted to straight photography in simply documenting the country’s transition, Ilfoveanu did it by embracing archaic technology (and its limitations) to dramatic effect, capturing images from the present and letting the past seep in through the medium itself. The images exhibit a dreamlike haze and seemingly random color effects, applied not to nostalgic scenes, but rather across post-industrial landscapes, desolate wastelands, and austere housing blocks.