BALKANIC-FANTASTIC STORIES

The artist employs an interdisciplinary methodology incorporating video, performance, drawing, and music. He delves into Balkan fantasy and the cultural disphoria experienced abroad through immersive media installations that function as portals to parallel worlds. In these fragments, both visitors and artists are invited to imagine a world beyond the constraints of cultural identity prejudices and to explore their own versions of how they have assimilated this identity into their personal selves.

Collaborating artists will be featured in a satellite project, Cultural Dysphoria, a video screening session that complements the Balkan stories with diverse experiences. Featured artists include: Blxsh (Khan), Ana-Maria Cojocaru, Ibrahim Kurt, Maria Mălcică, Ioana Mihai, Mircea Modreanu, Ana Nedeljkovic & Nikola Majdak Jr., and Mihai Aureliu Savin.

Radu-Mihai Tănasă explores a self-reflective, auto-ethnographic version of his identity within different cultural contexts (Romania vs. Netherlands). His work includes artistic research on European/Balkan diaspora, considering the stereotypes associated with this community. He highlights the state of cultural dysphoria, a condition experienced even by the artist himself. Cultural dysphoria describes the feeling of disconnect an individual perceives when they no longer identify with their inherited cultural identity.

This concept was theorized by Bogdan Ștefănescu in his work Post-Communism, Post-Colonialism / Siblings of Subalternity. He analyzes the cultural identity of the former USSR territories, particularly the Balkans, which are affected by cultural neurosis, anxiety, and general insecurity due to the region's encounter with paradoxical and complex power structures and social dynamics. This positioning reflects Radu-Mihai Tănasă’s experience, where in the Netherlands, he feels too different for the locals, and at home, he is perceived as “The Other.”

The exhibition features a series of paintings where Radu-Mihai Tănasă explores the concept of masculinity and socio-cultural differences between Western and Eastern Europe. The painting series "Male Nude" and the apocryphal visual journal in artist's book format narrate a chimeric creature, reflecting the cultural transitions and shocks experienced by the artist. These paintings are created on recycled cardboard from packages received from his home country. The book began as a personal journal to help the artist cope with the transition between cultures, as he himself experiences cultural dysphoria.

Through this exhibition, Radu-Mihai Tănasă creates an alternative world where identity and traditions intersect on a temporal axis of a journal, revealing the complexity of gender expression in the Balkans in an almost intimate way.