Dan Acostioaiei

Dan Acostioaei’s (b. 1974, Iași) works originate in his fascination with the overlap between consumer relations, the institutionalization of mysticism and the spectacularization of politics through forms of reverence similar to the belief in transubstantiation. The discontinuity of the cultural territory and the duplicitous contradictions between the spectacle of contemporary art and social commitment are reflected interrogatively, with irony and self-irony, in designing sets and choreographing associations on the verge of absurdity. His concern with the marginal condition of the provincial contemporary artist as relates to the exercise of power at different levels of institutional hegemony is most often placed in the “situations” imagined by Dan Acostioaei, himself, through the speculative religious language specific to Christian Orthodox worship, interspersed with fragments of media language, where the liturgical becomes design, lifestyle or the mundane. Selected exhibitions: Southern Constellations: The Poetics of the Non-Aligned, Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova (+MSUM), Ljubljana (2019); Life—a user’s manual, Art Encounters Biennale, Timișoara (2017); Notes on a Landscape, Art Safari, Kretzulescu Galleries, Bucharest (2017); În vremuri de speranţă și neliniște. Artă critică din Iași, MNAC Bucharest (2015–16); Few Were Happy with their Condition: Video and Photography in Romania, Motorenhalle, Dresden (2015); The School of Kyiv, Kyiv Biennale (2015); One Sixth of the Earth—Ecologies of Image, MUSAC, Leon (2012); Transitland: Video art in Central and Eastern Europe 1989–2009, Reina Sofia, Madrid (2010); Illuminations, Level 2 Gallery, Tate Modern, London (2007).