Ciprian Muresan / Yama

For the first time Yama hosts a hand-drawn animation that appears like a sketch on the night sky. A commissioned work by Romanian artist Ciprian Murean Untitled (2010) stems from conversations about his earlier work Pioneers (2008), an installation comprising forty lithographs that depict different children holding bags to their mouths. Many have misread the simple act that appears in each frame and assume that the children are blowing the bags up in order to burst them. Despite their naive appearance, they are in fact shown sniffing glue, a heartbreaking and depressing sight that is all too common in certain inner city areas and one that is particularly familiar to the public of central Istanbul. At the foot of the Marmara Pera and around the zone of Istiklal Caddesi every night young boys can be seen holding a bag of glue to their faces in the same way.

Rather than directly reference this act Muresan instead plays on the misreadings of his previous work and has produced for Yama a more humourous, but still dark, take on the issue. This time, just one child is highlighted and he is seen blowing up a frog that despite its inevitable likelihood of bursting surprises the boy as it explodes into thousands of pieces. A fun gesture turns out to be a cruel or perhaps simply un-controllable act and at the same time the image of the fairytale frog that turns into a prince/princess is thwarted. As we look up at the dark sky Untitled lights up Yama for a few seconds to propose that anyone can make a wish, but in an instant this bubble bursts and the sad reality of disappointment and broken aspirations that afflicts these individuals takes over from the childhood innocence of the frames before.

Commissioned for Yama by November Paynter.

Ciprian Muresan (b. 1977) lives and works in Cluj, Romania. He is an artist and the co-editor of VERSION artist run magazine and from 2005 an editor of IDEA art + society magazine [www.ideamagazine.ro] In 2009 Muresan was one of the representing artists for Romania at the 53rd Venice Biennale; the same year he also participated in among other exhibitions The Generational:Younger Than Jesus at the New Museum, NYC; Communism Never Happened, FEINKOST, Berlin and Incorrigible Believers, David Nolan Gallery, NYC.