Exhibition
Mircea Cantor
‘Which light kills you’ A proposition by Ami Barak
14 November 2009 — 23 January 2010
21 Woodlands Terrace, Glasgow
Mircea Cantor is the epitome of a 21st century artist, constantly crossing borders but always returning to his roots. Having grown up in Eastern Europe during the Communist era, Cantor frequently draws on his own memory to explore the realities of power and the disintegration of cultural boundaries. Cantor often positions himself at the crossroads between worlds, acting as an observer of societies and cultures and encouraging comparisons between differing attitudes and beliefs.
Cantor creates works that act as tools with which we can deconstruct the meaning of our everyday lives. Through subtle gestures and arrangements, he enhances our habitual perceptions and expectations, highlighting the peculiarities without lecturing in morality or artificial solutions. Cantor stages a reality that is in constant flux, deliberately resistant to unambiguous categorisation and decisively determined by uncertainty. His work takes up social issues while combining political content with a distinctly poetic formal vocabulary.
This exhibition, proposed by the French curator Ami Barak, is the first in an irregular series of ‘propositions by …’, bringing curatorial voices from elsewhere into our conversations about art.
Images © Mircea Cantor Courtesy the artist and Dvir Gallery, Tel Aviv