Mirela Popa — Migration — Galerie municipale Jean-Collet — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: September 9 → 14, 2012

From the steppes of Mongolia to the Sea of Ice near Chamonix in France: “Migration”, Mirela Popa’s exhibition is a stunning encapsulation of a series of epics that have fuelled the imagination down the centuries. Epics summed up in the stunning metaphorical image of the invasion of Europe by thousands of elephants; animals represented by glass figurines one could well imagine excavated from ancient Carthaginian tombs.

(…) This omnipresence of history in Mirela Popa’s œuvre brings us back to the relationship between the representational tradition of nineteenth-century painting and the modernity of a photography whose tone is somewhat German. Diachronically it plays its part in an interlacing of historicities and transformation of societies. It references indexical traces—steps in the snow, paths across the steppe—in which meanings are deliberately or involuntarily concealed.

Mirela Popa does not counterpose traditional societies and modernity: the steppes of Mongolia, after all, are dotted with Sovietera buildings. What interests her are the processes of mutation, stratification and memorisation. Landscape becomes a social object, with Mirela Popa intervening simultaneously as artist, historian and anthropologist, as an acute observer of societies evolving free of any intimation of chaos or disorder.