Text and documentation by Petra Dybbroe:

With an eccentric take on the scenography of ethnographic museums,
« The Caretaker » displays a fictive domestic environment and its fatigued protagonist. A site-specific ceramic fresco sets the background of the recognizable yet vague scenario. A distorted house facade engraved in the tiled wall stylized as an abstract logo serves the narrative like a green screen serves post-production. Playing with inside-out notions echoing with Roos space situated in the gallerist own apartment, the fresco revives private vs. public ownership dilemmas.
Comically commenting on the visual propaganda of tiled home facades in communist Romania, the carved drawing was made after a photograph of a self-promoted house seller on the internet who publishes only dramatic and distorted shots of facades. Intertwining both approaches to publicity, the wall piece stands as a glitch in ostentatious tactics and theatrically exposes its mechanics. The fatigued and unimpressed protagonist awaits its role; an empty extra-soft acrylic blanket welcomes companionship in any form. With a confidently lazy pose, the caretaker blurs into a provider or an owner depending on the companionship. An inclusive exhibition with staged scenarios where domestic preconceptions are triggered with hospitable alienation.

* A special documentation of the exhibition stages a dog (Tosca, familiar with Roos space) and a young child (Cornelia, close relative to Ispas). 

Ioana Ispas (b.1994 in Cluj, Romania) lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark. The exhibition is supported by Grosserer L. F. Foghts Fond.

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