A D E L I N A I V A N
 
b i o g r a p h y
c o n t a c t
n e w s
  
w o r k s
landscape grids
the real line
întinse.destinse
fragile landscapes
white rows
a line that weaves and winds
white fold
deconstructed squares
textile layers
self portrait
cuts
left square right square
geometric structures
journal of grids and signs
black on white
black squares
frames
frugalitas, severitas, fidelis
atena adjusting her sandal
circling
hello vera
alter object
to restore
time delusion
albedo
 
l i n k s
p u b l i c a t i o n s

 

 

Atena adjusting her sandal 1 & 2 - JeanClaudeMaier Gallery Frankfurt - exhibition view

Archival print on Hahnemühle paper, 63x43 cm, 2016, Ed. #2 /5 + 2AP 

 

 

Atena adjusting her sandal - Installation view - ODD Bucharest /Atelier 35 space (2016) 

Atena adjusting her sandal - Installation & video - ODD Bucharest /Atelier 35 space (2016) 

 

 

  

 

 

Atena adjusting her sandal / Installation / Video 4’ (2016) - ODD Bucharest (Atelier 35 space) - April 2016

Text: Georgiana Cojocaru

Adelina Ivan's installation at ODD delimits an immersive demarche into a universe of feminine dreams, school uniforms and girlhood pathos. Though her girl characters are trapped in a world on the verge of collapse, entrapped in social restrictions, they nonetheless try to put aside their fair share of triumph.

The moment Atena steps out of the line is arrested through conceptualization. Atena's simple tying of her sportshoe sets up to redefine the meaning of freedom. The gesture is both a performance and a historic intervention without being explicitly demonstrative. By means of reapprropiating the grace and dignity of Greek kinetic female statues her video re-enacts one of the famous postures of Athena- the unimpeded, bending over her leg in order to tie her sandal. Atena opts out of the line. She is all strength and renewed power. She allows herself a moment of respite. Her gesture is no longer feminine but feminist. Not only political but also aesthetically charged. The natural, unschooled gesture gets to heavily contrast with the artificial of the situation and the power structures that generates it. A gym lesson in 1988 is a spectacle of young, healthy, athletic bodies onto which the world is eager to plow and inseminate its contagious forms of authority. The girls move rhythmically their anonymous limbs forming clockwork. Atena's self-composure and witty disobedience is disarming. Radically ambiguous in meaning and intentions, Atena's gesture intervenes upon the hollowness and disingenuousness of both the situation and the false naturalness of the choreographed moment.