Anca Bucur
area: Visual Art
Key Facts
nationality
Romaniaarea
Visual Artresidence
Bucharestrecommending institution
tranzit.org / ERSTE Stiftungtime period
September 2024 - October 2024Anca Bucur (b. 1989) is a visual artist and writer based in Bucharest. Her artistic practice is research-based and cross-media, often expressed in the form of installations. In her most recent works, she explores themes such as industrial extractivism, agricultural collectivisation and social reproductive labour in the context of local histories and places. She is interested in the dual and unified character of the artwork, which functions as both knowledge production and political action. Anca Bucur has written several texts that have been published in brochures and anthologies. She is a member of the editorial collective frACTalia and the Cooperative for Research and Political Action Ecaterina Arbore.
During her residency at MQ, she will continue the research underpinning her work “A labor of love” which deals with the process of collectivization of agriculture in state socialist Romania. Interested in the social and economic structural transformations that this process produced, Anca Bucur centers her research on the role and labor of peasant women within the cooperatives. While trying to offer a counter-narrative to the mainstream anticommunist literature written on the subject, she looks into the digital archive of the most important gazettes, newspapers and magazines of that period in order to better understand the material historical realities of the socialist village and of the peasant women. Her research also considers socialist feminist and Marxist texts written by political theorists and activists on the condition of women workers in neo-serfdom and socialist Eastern Europe as well as literature or artworks which deal with agrarian collectivism.