Arantxa Etcheverria, Adelina Ivan and Alina Popa
17 September 2022 – 11 February 2023
Gallery One
Curator: Adriana Tranca
The Real Line is an exhibition about movement and moving. It is about the point and the line and all the gestures in between. It brings together Bucharest-based artists Arantxa Etcheverria, Adelina Ivan and Alina Popa (1982 - 2019) working with geometry and its extensions in gender inequality and our society’s constructs in what is known as a women’s place.
The idiosyncrasy of this proposition comes from the direct confrontation of the apparently opposing concepts of feminisms and domesticity in a critical attempt to investigate the possibility of one reinforcing the other. Can domesticity be a site of transformative feminist discourse and praxis? Can geometry, a traditionally male dominated discipline, be an agent for this transformation?
The Real Line is an exhibition about movement and moving. It is about the point and the line and all the gestures in between.
In order to construct a drawing, one needs to start with a point, and then another point, link them, thus resulting in a line, a connection. In order to move, one needs to start from a position, and then another position, link them, thus resulting in a motion, a connection.
Within Euclidean geometry, a real line is a notional line in which every real number is conceived of as represented by a point in an orderly, sequential manner; a real number is a number that is not imaginary, it’s any number that represents an amount of something, such as a weight, a volume, a distance. For over two thousand years, the adjective "Euclidean" was unnecessary because no other sort of geometry had been conceived. Since the 19th century, it was no longer taken for granted that Euclidean geometry describes physical space. Elliptic geometry and hyperbolic geometry contested the norms of traditional Euclidean language and further opened the field. The evolution of geometry (and mathematics in general, is highly dominated by men’s names, although women mathematicians have contributed to its development, starting with Hypatia (b. 370 AD), to Sophie Germain (b. 1776) or Dorothy Vaughn (b. 1910), the first African American NASA supervisor and so on. As in too many areas, women have been erased from history.
The Real Line, Arantxa Etcheverria, Adelina Ivan and Alina Popa, installation at E-WERK Luckenwalde, 2022. Image courtesy of Stefan Korte.
The Real Line brings together Arantxa Etcheverria, Adelina Ivan and Alina Popa (1982 - 2019), three artists that, at a first reflection, are strongly connected by geometry and geometrical shapes and particularly by their interest in the point and the line, what they conceptually represent as well as how they materially manifest/incarnate. On a second reading, speculating on the fact that all three artists are female plus that their practices are intimate modes of self reflection, the exhibition proposes considering the exhibited artworks as manifestations of domesticity, of spaces created by connections (between dots, lines, planes, thoughts, movements). The idiosyncrasy of this proposition comes from the direct confrontation of the apparently opposing concepts of feminisms and domesticity in a critical attempt to investigate the possibility of one reinforcing the other. Can domesticity be a site of transformative feminist discourse and praxis? Can geometry, a traditionally male dominated discipline, be an agent for this transformation?
Domesticity is housekeeping, hidden work, more often than not unpaid, it’s the maintenance of the private familial space, it is routine work aimed at the creation of a safe and comfortable environment for the loved ones, it is labour of love. Traditionally this role has been ascribed to women who have been confined exclusively to perform under the all-knowing domination of men. Over the years, the domestic has gained resolute political agency, “women’s personal space” and its relation to the masculine figure has been decomposed and analysed, thus changing the cultural narrative, proposing new ethics of existence. Artistic practices and aesthetic and conceptual proposals have long challenged these social codes and continue to do so.
The three female artists are non-collinear, yet connected by the point and the line, thus determining a plane, a level of existence and practice, extending infinitely.
The Real Line, Arantxa Etcheverria, Adelina Ivan and Alina Popa, installation at E-WERK Luckenwalde, 2022. Image courtesy of Stefan Korte
