The Gender Battles of Alexandra Croitoru
By Sara Schnadt
Alexandra Croitoru is a visual artist based in Bucharest, Romania. Her work explores the intersection of personal, group and national identities using photography, written texts and publications, installations, video and performance. Many of her works, including Untitled (Prime Minister), seek to expose and challenge sociological, geo-political and gender power structures in present-day Romania. Other projects such as A Preliminary Report on the Past Present use psychotronic weapons of mass destruction in Romania to examine the tenuous line between fact and fiction in the writing and documentation of history. Most recently, Croitoru has concentrated on research-based projects that investigate social mechanisms in a transnational environment. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Artistic Research at theNational University of Arts, Bucharest. Her residency at 18th Street is supported by the Trust for Mutual Understanding.
How would you define your work?
I would say that my work is a critical reflection on the contemporary context, be it the political, social or even the artistic context. Once somebody asked me why all my work is critical, don’t I have any heroes or situations that I am happy with? And I probably do have a few, but I don’t really feel like making art in relation to them. This has to do also with the fact that I am quite a cynical person and I usually question everything around me. So my art practice mirrors this way of relating to the world – asking uncomfortable questions, and not offering answers.
