PAVEL BRAILA : o expozitie in ITALIA, MILANO

Pavel Braila
Pavel Braila


08 novembre - 09 dicembre 2010

Inaugurazione lunedì 08 novembre.


Chisinau - City difficoult to pronounce

2010, colour, sound, 18'9", without dialogue


Andris Brinkmanis



english texts



ARTRA gallery presents Pavel Braila’s first solo exhibition in Italy. Curated by Fabiola Naldi and Alessandra Pioselli it will run from 9 November to 7 December 2010.

A multifaceted artist in his use of media and languages, which include video, performance, neon and painting, the main focus of Pavel Braila’s art is the situation in Moldova in the post-Soviet era and its uncertain identity. How do you pronounce Chisinau? In French it’s Schischino, in German Shizinau, in Russian Kishiniov, and in Romanian and Moldovan ‘ki?i'n?w’. The ‘unpronounceable’ name of the capital of Moldova, Pavel Braila’s native country, is the point of departure for the video Chisinau - City Difficult to Pronounce (2010), which is presented for the first time by ARTRA, and represents the first part of Odyssey MD-2010, the project the artist is developing on the history of a country in the midst of profound transformation.

Post-Soviet Moldova is no longer being chronicled: since 1986 the country’s National Archive, which for many decades under the Soviet Union systematically documented daily and public life through film and photographs, has stopped doing so as if the country had ceased to exist, as if it had disappeared from History. The intention of the project in progress, Odyssey MD-2010, is to document a year in the life of Moldova to compensate for the removal and lack of memory of the small republic, which has undergone radical changes over the past quarter of a century.

The changing identity of a nation is mirrored in the difficulty of orienting the identities of single individuals, and the history of a country is reflected in personal identity. The theme weaves it way through Pavel Braila’s work in the form of a reflection on ways to document, archive and narrate reality. The two levels continually intertwine in his work, and in all the pieces on show, until they reach autobiography, from the neon works Fear is Shorter than Fervour (2008) and Want (2008) to the videos Kick Off (2010) and Recalling Events (2001), up to the series of paintings My Father's Dreams (2008), an ironic representation of the aspirations of the artist's father, who would have liked his son to have been, among other things, an astronaut, in this way exposing the visions of an era in private dreams.


Pavel Braila was born in Chisinau (Moldova) in 1971. He lives and works in Berlin and Chisinau.
In 2002 he participated in Documenta 11, with the video Shoes for Europe.
He has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions. Among his solo exhibitions: 2010 Pavel Braila, National Museum Brukenthal, Romania; "Kick-Off” Artra, Milan; 2009 “Source”, Jan Dhaese, Gent; 2008 Want, Yvon Lambert Paris; 2007 Baron’s Hill, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Stedelijk Museum Schiedam, Schiedam, The Netherlands; Kiasma - Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki; 2006 Baltic Art Center, Visby; Galerie Im Taxispalais, Innsbruck; “Slow Poetry of Life Performance”, Jan Dhaese, Gent; 2005 MIT List Visual Arts Center, Boston; Shoes for Europe, Baltic Art Center, Visby, Sweden; List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts USA; 2004 33 Revolutions Per Minute, Yvon Lambert, Paris, France; 2003 Performance white or Pale Unfinished Thoughts, Kunstbuero, Wien , Austria.





Oedipus Betrayed – History’s lost projects


Given that the subject is a father’s desires and an exhibition by the son in which they are presented, it would be almost predictable to approach this project according to the Western psychoanalytic canon. But we must not fall into this trap. Here, the historical, social and political picture is not merely a background, but an essential part of the work, without which an understanding of this show is bound to be incomplete.

If this is an “Oedipus betrayed” it is because the artist’s family triangle has been assailed by so many leaps and breaks, enough to destroy any notion of historical, political or cultural continuity. Thus the oedipal version is invalidated – it joins an endless refrain, leaving no stable terrain behind other than memory and desire.

The paternal imperative here ¬– “I want you to do this” – has lost its authority and become almost grotesque. It even seems tragicomic, given that both father and son were part of the same schizophrenia that marked the end of the last century. A precise moment which, more than anything, saw the collapse of the plan for socialist emancipation.

When looking at this map, we must always keep in mind desires that are “out of date”. If at one time this mapping offered not only a reading of the extent of the empire but also its laws, customs and stereotypes, all it is today is an historical map of a territory that no longer exists; a reflection of obsolete imaginations that we have to find new lenses to read.

I would say that Braila’s gesture is neither nostalgic nor an attempt at reconciliation. His is truly a minor work, in the way Deleuze and Guattari intended when speaking of Kafka, according to whom: “The second characteristic of minor literatures is that everything in them is political. In major literatures, in contrast, the individual concern (familial, marital, and so on) joins with other no less individual concerns, the social milieu serving as a mere environment or a background; this is so much the case that none of these Oedipal intrigues are specifically indispensable or absolutely necessary but all become as one in a large space. Minor literature is completely different; its cramped space forces each individual intrigue to connect immediately to politics. The individual concern thus becomes all the more necessary, indispensable, magnified, because a whole other story is vibrating within it. In this way, the family triangle connects to other triangles—commercial, economic, bureaucratic, juridical-that determine its values. When Kafka indicates that one of the goals of a minor literature is the "purification of the conflict that opposes father and son and the possibility of discussing that conflict," it isn't a question of an Oedipal phantasm but of a political program .And as Kafka himself wrote in his diaries: “Literature (art in this case) is less a concern of literary history, than of the people. "

Here, too, amid these pictures of an outmoded “realism” and the neon sign, “WANT”, we find ourselves inside a device of minor art. By utilizing a private story, this device tells us the story of a whole nation: its stereotypes, dreams, desires, loss of identity and of a keen effort to find this history by identifying itself with other imaginations not yet explored. If during the entire period of the Cold War the West represented the outside for the Soviet world and communism was the outside for the West, then here we are dealing with a reflection in today’s space that has ended the major antagonisms.

Braila has always paid particular attention to these details. Perhaps this stems from his studies as an engineer or perhaps from his passion for photography, thanks to which he became an artist. The loss of identity, the loss of history and memory are always at the centre of his investigations, but in this case they take an unexpected form, one that requires greater attention than usual.

Looking at this game of mirrors, the one thing that remains unclear to me is how the artist might explain the word want instead of the word that comes to my mind; namely, desire? Maybe after this betrayals (also after having explored the Western context) there’s nothing left but to follow the endless drive of wanting – but what?

Andris Brinkmanis