Aurelia Mihai — À propos — Slash Paris

Aurelia Mihai (b. in Bucharest, Romania) is an artist and filmmaker who lives and works in Hamburg, Germany. Since 2009 she has been teaching at the Braunschweig University of Art.

Aurelia Mihai´s work brings clashing cultural, social, and political phenomena and events into focus. In her work Aurelia Mihai links aspects of documentation and research with fiction in a multifaceted way. Thus legends and historical incidents are frequently the occasion or the starting point for a socio critical examination of the present.

“Transhumanţa, which was created in Goch in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, is a two-channel video installation that follows a herd of sheep on its way from the countryside to the town. For a time the herd is accompanied by a shepherd (and the camera) on foot; then, from a helicopter’s perspective one sees the herd on a trailer behind a tractor travelling through rural Westphalian scenery until it arrives in the narrow streets of the small town.

Both projections evoke an impression of displacement: the sheep do not belong in those asphalted streets — not as a herd nor as passengers on a tractor’s trailer; they do not belong near those brick houses, or in those pedestrian zones or those playgrounds. The clearest indication that the sheep are totally out of place in this north German urban environment are the looks on the faces of the passers-by, who stop their everyday activities to stare after the black and motley coloured herd. The climax of the strangeness occurs in the final scene when, much to their surprise, the sheep find themselves in a museum; the slippery parquet flooring hinders them from running and jumping, so they walk around amidst the exhibits, wide-eyed. Transhumanţa (from Latin ‘trans’ meaning over, and ‘humus’, earth; English: transhumance) is the Romanian word for the twice yearly seasonal movement of sheep herds from lowland to highland pastures and back again. This saves the trouble of keeping the sheep indoors in the winter, and used to be practiced all over Europe. Language theorists claim that the development of the Romanian language originates from this practice of migration. We do not know for sure whether Romanian has Dacian-Roman origins, or whether it evolved at the time of the Migration Period; however, it is certain that the majority of Romanians were shepherds, who regularly went on treks as long as eight hundred kilometres that spanned various language areas; consequently substrates of these languages were absorbed into their own. (…)" Julia Draganovic (2008)

LUPA is an experimental movie that analyses the structures of the representation and reception of historical facts; an investigative short film that takes an ancient work of art (the Capitoline Wolf) and its path through history as the occasion to visualize its ideologically charged meaning that exists up to the present-day.
Spread all over the world, the Capitoline Wolf is the most common non-serially produced monument. In Romania alone, there are 22 examples of this Roman statue.

The reception of the original and the reproductions is also a theme of the movie.
Here the reproduction, seen ideologically, is a substitute for the original.
It is not the artistic value that counts, but the historic importance. From an artistic point of view, the original Capitoline Wolf is currently experiencing the opposite: de-mystification triggered by doubts as to its provenance.

“The film unfolds on multiple temporal and narrative planes: the historical research combines with a fictional register intended to lend representation to historic episodes that have shaped the development of this iconic symbol of identity: the animal that saves and nurtures the twins Romulus and Remus. The Lupa belongs to everybody and nobody; it is a copy without an original, whose capacity to endure and adapt leads it to embrace sometimes divergent, even contradictory meanings.”
Magda Radu

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Aurelia Mihai is the recipient of numerous prizes and scholarships for her video works including the E STAR Scholarship from the Institute for Electronic Arts, Alfred University, New York, the Villa Aurora Scholarship, Los Angeles, USA, the EMARE Scholarship Hull Time Based Arts, Kingston upon Hull, UK , EuRegio Art Prize, Germany–The Netherlands, German Academy Villa Massimo, Rome, Italy, IASPIS, International Artist Studio Programme Stockholm, Sweden.

Her works have been exhibited internationally and have been seen at numerous festivals, including: Falckenberg Collection, Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Städtische Galerie Wolfsburg, K21 Düsseldorf, Kunsthalle Mainz, Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin, Hamburger Kunsthalle, “The Worldly House“, Documenta 13, Kassel, Germany, the Chelsea Art Museum, New York, USA, Centre Pompidou, Paris, The Louvre Auditorium, Louvre Museum, Paris, Centre International d’Art Contemporain de Pont Aven, France, Cobra Museum in Amstelveen, The Netherlands, Cass Gallery — Central House, London, Sheffield Institute of Arts Gallery, Centre of Contemporary Art and the Nature World, Plymouth, UK, National Museum of Contemporary Art MNAC, Bucharest, Periferic 8, Biennial of Contemporary Art, Iaşi, Romania, Museo Nacional Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain, Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, Riga, Latvia, MACRO Rome, PAN — Palace of the Arts of Naples, Italy, Landesgalerie Linz, Salzburg Museum, Austria, MOCAK Museum of Contemporary Art, Krakow, Poland, Kunstmuseum Thurgau, Switzerland, Cinéma du Musée, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Canada and Museu Correios, Brasilia, Brasil.