Andra Ursuţa is rarely written about without the modifier ‘Romanian artist’ being added to her name. No artist wants to be boxed in by demographics but, for Ursuţa, these form the building materials for her work. Perceptions of her otherness, her foreignness and associated stereotypes are deflected with a sceptical laugh. To those in the West, the demarcation of Eastern Europe is often blurred.
Folk tales, gypsy culture and Ursuţa’s own family history are the sieve through which her uniquely mordant and morbid perspective is filtered. Witchery and Roma culture were the spur for the artist’s 2012 exhibition, Magical Terrorism, at New York’s Ramiken Crucible gallery. According to the press release, the show was an act of solidarity with a group of protesting Romanian witches who, in 2011, had revolted against the country’s government for declaring witchcraft, along with astrology and fortune-telling, an officially recognized occupation and thereby liable to taxation. In response, the witches cast a spell on the high court, throwing mandrake, dog faeces and dead cats into the Danube.
The gallery was filled with Ursuţa’s witches: life-sized marble sculptures, in a Social Realist style, which she had fabricated in China. All identical, they are based on a single reportage photograph of an unnamed Roma woman waiting to be deported from France during President François Hollande’s controversial evictions of Roma camps around Paris. The terrorism part of Magical Terrorism was her memorable decision to break the large glass storefront of Ramiken Crucible. The gallery is known for encouraging artists not to be reverent of its Lower East Side space, but Ursuţa’s action made an indelible impression, with broken shards of glass strewn on the floor amongst her sculptures. At the back of the gallery was what appeared to be a crashed moon rover (Cartwoman, 2012) – a sort of wheeled cart in silver urethane embedded with a pair of boots. It could have been a roving monument to the roaming women in the room. Crudely made busts of iron, aluminium, concrete and manure were placed on pedestals and the floor. They resembled large primitivist figures, headless torsos with sagging, triangular breasts adorned with long, bib-like necklaces of coins hanging in rows, sewn onto deconstructed windbreakers.