April 25, 2024
Editorial Note
Organizing an exhibition featuring artworks that are temporary in nature and thus no longer exist in their original form, alongside works that still exist, presents many dilemmas and questions. Thus, in preparation for the exhibition Ana Lupas. On this Side of the River Elbe, Stedelijk curator Leontine Coelewij paid several visits to the artist in question at her studio in Cluj to discuss her work and said dilemmas. Below is a report of these visits.
Curator Leontine Coelewij talking to Ana Lupas at her studio, April 2019. Photo: Maria Rus Bojan
I meet Ana Lupas for the first time at her studio in the spring of 2019. Lupas has lived in Cluj, Transylvania, all her life, but created her works in various places in Romania and abroad. She maintains several (indoor and outdoor) workplaces in the city, one of which is a stately old townhouse The building has been in the family since the early part of the 20th century but during the communist era, the regime took control of it and repurposed it for institutional use. Lupas eventually got the house back (after almost ten years of trial against the State) and has been working there ever since. She also works in a purpose-built studio complex from the 1960s, which she shares with several other artists.
Facade of Ana Lupas’s studio in Cluj, April 2019. Photo: Leontine Coelewij.
Lupas gives me a tour of her studio and shows me some of her most important works from the past six decades. They cover a wide variety of media, including drawings and some extraordinary textile sculptures, such as Coats to Borrow (1989). This work consists of a series of handmade coats that she made from various bits of fabric and remnants of army uniforms. She opens one of the coats to show me its lining, revealing a haphazard arrangement of stitched fabric labels with people’s names. The deliberate collaged and hand-scrawled aesthetic reminds me of fanzines from the punk era. Lupas tells me she made these jackets in 1989, the last year of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s communist dictatorship. Demonstrations against the totalitarian regime had been forbidden, so people had to find clandestine ways to contact like-minded compatriots. So, she passed the coats to other artists with instructions to stitch a label with their names into the lining before passing them on to the next person. The work reminds me of other iconic examples of wearable art, such as Joseph Beuys’ Felt Suit or Franz Erhard Walther’s fabric objects, which can be activated by the audience. But Lupas’s coats are less stylized than these examples and are decidedly revolutionary in intent. They are symbols of resistance against an inhumane ideology, she tells me.
Ana Lupas showing the lining of a coat from Coats to Borrow, April 2019. Photo: Leontine Coelewij.
During my visit, I also learn more about Lupas’s turbulent personal background. She comes from a family of intellectuals and politicians who played a prominent role in Romanian society before the Second World War. As a pupil and very young student she often visited the ethnographic museum in Cluj, where she learned a lot about the ancient traditions that were, at the time, still widely celebrated in surrounding villages. In 1964, she began working on a project that drew on these local rural traditions but was also radically innovative in that it broke with traditional sculpture in terms of material, scale and ambition. It was an extraordinary undertaking, given that visual art under communist rule was meant to abide by the doctrine of socialist realism that mandated glorifying Ceaușescu and the regime’s political ideology.
The result was the monumental work The Solemn Process (1964-1976, 1980-1985 and 1985-2008), now in the collection of Tate Modern, which was where I saw it. It took up almost an entire room in the Performer and Participant display of works from the permanent collection, and consisted of twenty-four metal objects, ranging from round to cylindrical shapes, and two large wall banners, each displaying a grid of photographs of the work’s origins. The metal objects had started out as wreaths composed of wheat and straw, which Lupas had made with the help of local villagers. These were displayed in the immediate area and on farms. Given the organic nature of their composition, the objects eventually began to fall apart. In response, Lupas developed a way to preserve them, which entailed encasing them in metal. The Solemn Process is especially notable for the length of time it took to make: over forty years from its inception in 1964 to its final form in 2008.
Photo of The Solemn Process (1964-1976, 1980-1985 and 1985-2008) in the permanent collection display at Tate Modern and a floor plan of the galleries for the exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, September 2022. Photo: Leontine Coelewij.
Ana Lupas showing items from her archive during a studio visit, September 2022. Photo: Leontine Coelewij.
Lupas’s work is often temporary in nature and sometimes involves natural or perishable materials. Thus, she often has to devise ways to preserve what she makes. The exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum includes several works that only existed for a short while and are now only available in the form of photographs and video recordings. However, these images and recordings are limited in quantity and not up to the quality of documentation we’ve come to expect from more recent installations or works of performance art. Documentation tools were hard to come by in the Romania of the 1970s and ‘80s, and owning a camera was considered suspicious by the regime, says Lupas.
Ana Lupas next to items from her archive, April 2019. Photo: Leontine Coelewij.
The documentation that remains of Humid Installation (1970), one of her best-known works, consists of a set of less than twenty slides. The shots were taken by a local photographer who just happened to be in the area. He took a few in the first stage of the work’s creation, which involved poles being driven into the ground by men from a village in Mărgău. He took some more in the next stage, in which women hung rolls of linen over clotheslines stretched between the poles. He then photographed the entire installation from an elevated position on the hills. The slides provide an overview of the work as a whole, and the process of its creation, and also show the houses and church in the neighboring village.
Color slides of Humid Installation (1970) from Ana Lupas’s archive, May 2023. Photo: Leontine Coelewij.
More shots were discovered during the preparations for the show at the Stedelijk, but Lupas didn’t consider them illustrative of the original installation, so they were left out of the exhibition. The man who took the shots had a background in ethnographic photojournalism, and Lupas felt that this had made him pay too much attention to the women’s traditional outfits; work on the installation took place on a Sunday, and the women were dressed accordingly. These additional shots therefore placed too much emphasis on the folkloric aspect of the work, hence their exclusion. However, the discovery also included something of value: rolls of the original fabric from the installation, which added a hitherto unseen element to the exhibition.
Ana Lupas’s work raises questions about how historical work that is temporary in nature should be presented and curated. Which elements of these works are available for presentation and which remain hidden for good? How were such works documented and what fragments were preserved? These questions are inherent in the practice of curation, but in the case at hand, they are also an essential part of the artist’s practice. The exhibition illustrates several ways in which Lupas dealt with the issue of impermanence through the embedding of acts of conservation, maintenance and iteration in her artistic practice.
Ana Lupas with a section of the installation Monument of Cloth (1990). Photo: Leontine Coelewij.
This article is based on multiple studio visits, which took place in April 2019, September 2021, September 2022 and May 2023. Thanks to Ana Lupas, Marina Lupas and Maria Rus Bojan.
About the Author
Leontine Coelewij is curator of modern and contemporary art at the Stedelijk Museum. In recent years she has curated Yto Barrada – Bad Color Combos (2022), Bruce Nauman (2021, in collaboration with Tate Modern, London), Nam June Paik-The Future is Now (2020, with Tate Modern and SF MoMA), Marlene Dumas – The Image as Burden (2014, Stedelijk Museum, and touring Tate Modern and Fondation Beyler), Seth Siegelaub: Beyond Conceptual Art (2016), Edward Krasiński (2017) and Lily van der Stokker – Friendly Good (2018/2019).
Next to this, Leontine Coelewij is responsible for the new display of the Stedelijk Museum collection 1950-1980 Everyday, Someday and Other Stories, which opened in February 2022. She has published articles in catalogues and magazines about Marlene Dumas, Remy Jungerman, Nam June Paik, Aernout Mik and many others. She is currently working on a retrospective of the work of Ana Lupas, which is scheduled to open in 2024.
