Alina Popa

📍 Venue → Hospital

Point Pet and The Grounds are Gone and I am Hanging from this Sentence are two distinct performances by Alina Popa that are “unperformable” on stage. The former is accessible in a blog post, an upload of documentation in prose and drawing. It registers as “I wish I could adopt a point”—an indirect invitation to whoever stumbles upon it. The latter is labeled a “diagrammatic performance” that is illustrated in a video and may be construed as instructional: how to diagram a sentence that one wishes to utter. These works distil the consciousness of language, ideology, and memory in formulating their fascination with stable ground and knowable points. Diagrams and viewpoints have contained art. Popa, in writing the theory of these two artistic products, proposes that within the tradition of abstraction and speculation, concepts have never been truly wild, including in art.

Alina Popa (February 1, 1982, Ploiești – February 1, 2019) was a Romanian artist who moved between choreography, theory, and contemporary art. She was a co-founder of the Bureau of Melodramatic Research (BMR) and co-initiator of the ArtLeaks platform. Her political and artistic research centered on affect theory, the relationship between neoliberalism and melodrama, and the ideological ties between mountaineering and nationalism. Popa studied finance at the Bucharest Academy of Economic Studies (2000–2004) before studying painting, cinematography, and photography at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts, Bucharest (2003–2009). At the BMR, which she founded together with Irina Gheorghe in 2009, she researched the ways in which emotion is gendered and feminized, created work that addresses the effects of capitalism in contemporary society, and formed an online platform that aims to amplify the voices of cultural workers whose labor rights have been violated. She showed and performed at various institutions, such as MUMOK in Vienna, DEPO in Istanbul, and Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin. She lived and worked in Bucharest.

Installation view (c) Jonáš Verešpej