Bio : Born 1971 in Chişinău, Republic of Moldova, part of the former Soviet Union. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany and Chişinău, Republic of Moldova.
Description : The video probes a politically enforced East-West-differentiation, against the backdrop of historical transition, as inscribed into the everyday experience of travelling and commuting. In the small frontier train station of Ungheni at the Moldavian-Romanian border, every train stops for three hours and is lifted two meters in the air to change wheels from Russian Gauge used in Moldova to Standard Gauge used in Romania and Western Europe. The trains’ laborious passage between East and West (illegally recorded by the artist since no shooting is allowed in the Moldavian border area) hosts a double fantasy structure of an ever growing desire to gain access to Western Europe, with the prevailing notion demanding the homogenization of communicative and technological tools to neutralize distance and place. Shot in digital video, two images are projected mirroring the ever-present subject of how to locate and mediate subjectivity in times of fragmentation, dislocation and a new myth of transnational identity.