Art Encounters 2017 Exhibitions:
Urban Insights

Norbert Costin (b. 1984) is an artist based in Romania. Costin holds an M.F.A. from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. Norbert Costin’s research combines photographs, videos, drawings and installations, to investigate the effects of memory and the mental constructions generated by an object or image, viewed as two distinct conditions and unified in a dualistic identity.

Recent exhibitions (selected): ibid., Black Framed Glass Cube Gallery, Târgu Mureș; Narrating Images / Imagining Stories, Domino, Plan B Gallery, Cluj-Napoca; Ellipsis Ellipse, Réunion, Zürich; I’m the Invisible Man, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest; The Liberated Page, Bâtiment d’art contemporain, Geneva; Words Written in Your Mental Space, Black Framed Glass Cube Gallery at The Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts, Stockholm; 24 Spaces – A Cacophony, Malmö Konsthall; Cutting all the Safety Lines, Galleri Mejan, Stockholm; Black Mirror | s Archive | s, Hus 28, Skeppsholmen, Stockholm.

Norbert Costin’s research combines photographs, videos, drawings and installations, to investigate the effects of memory and the mental constructions generated by an object or image, viewed as two distinct conditions and unified in a dualistic identity.

The diptych An Expression of Time I and II stages the silhouette of a man with his back turned, standing on the top of a plinth contemplating a wide-open landscape. The same scene takes place identically during a gray day and against a night sky. With this work Costin bring us to a suspended time reminiscent of a Romantic relation to the landscape that subvert the role of monuments. Monuments are built to remind us of a person or a particular event, which has become important to a collectivity for its historical or cultural heritage. Here the artist alludes to a monument that celebrates what’s being observed, at two different moments, a monument to the expression of time.

Images:

1. Norbert Costin, An Expression of Time II (2011-2012), inkjet print on archival grade paper, size depending on the installation, photo credits: the artist