Fragmentarium - 2011

To whom it might concern, Elena Copuzeanu is one of the very first representatives of the younger generation of Romanian artists who engaged in the reworking of the performance as an artistic genre. She has set landmarks in the happening&performance practices. Back in the mid-90s, she succeeded to focus wider attention on group- or solo-performances developing both in the public space in its physical sense (the street) and in its virtual sense too (mass-media, posters, publications). Her 1994 "Homage to Mandela" (nothing to do with the late Nelson Mandela, but with a local, Bucharest thug of the same nickname) highlighted the aggressive invasion of public prejudices linked to the burgeoning consumer culture onto the personal/visual space of the individuals sharing the same urban milieu. Her further works, actions and events went more and more toward enacting the innermost reception of external, socially codified stimuli. Her intuitive works mirror the paradoxical cohabitation of socially codified gestures and behaviors and personally estranged, inchoate feelings. Her work is neither aesthetic, pleasurable, nor therapeutic, healing, but it keeps on being vivid and troubling. erwin kessler, art critic