Chance Encounters: The Circulation of Ana Lupas's Works - Archive ouverte HAL
Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2024

Chance Encounters: The Circulation of Ana Lupas's Works

Résumé

In 1982, Romanian artist Ana Lupas took advantage of her exhibition at the Cantonal Museum of Fine Arts in Lausanne to hand out a postcard that depicted a human fetus enclosed in a jar. It is worth noting that Lupas, although choosing the form of the postcard, preferred not to send it as mail art, undoubtedly for security reasons. However, various archives of exhibitions held before 1989 in Western Europe show that she did not always try to bypass postal services. These archives contain numerous photographs of her works, which the artist often sent in multiple copies, probably hoping that the organizers could use them to disseminate her work more widely. My proposal examines the ways Lupas chose to circulate her works. I will investigate how the means of dissemination transform her creations. Among all of Lupas's pieces, the one whose photographic reproduction was most frequently sent is a monumental installation of weavings manually executed by women. This work primarily circulated through a photograph presenting it in an overview, which precisely erases the artist's interest in the materiality of the woven pieces. It is this photograph that the editors of the American feminist journal Heresies published in a 1981 issue titled “Earthkeeping/Earthshaking: Feminism & Ecology.” In the absence of direct contact with Lupas, they reinterpreted her work in light of their own concerns. My paper addresses these transformations in the meaning of Lupas's works as they circulate and encounter different contexts. It will focus on the notion of feminism shaped by Lupas's work. Like other Romanian artists, Lupas did not have access to American or Western European feminist theories, and I will examine in my paper what notion of feminism is constructed by the postcard prepared for the Lausanne exhibition and the installation of woven pieces.
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Dates et versions

hal-04745416 , version 1 (20-10-2024)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : hal-04745416 , version 1

Citer

Parvu Ileana. Chance Encounters: The Circulation of Ana Lupas's Works. Women and Mail Art. Gendered Perspectives on Marginal Artistic Practices, Elize Mazadiego; Agata Jakubowska, Oct 2024, Bern (CH), Switzerland. ⟨hal-04745416⟩

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