Site specific installation: various personal objects, video (29
minutes and 59 seconds)


Within and by means of the container in Haifa, Moldovan creates a
unique personal work revealing a complex relationship with his father
and a special bond between them.

To a great extent Moldovan treats cultural values connected to text
and visual images, and also grapples with post-modern theories on the
relativity of truth, manipulation of reality, and the shaping of
national memory and of new mythologies. He is an acknowledged artist
who knows no bounds and refuses to recognize generally accepted norms
as self-evident. Instead he chooses to test and reexamine them in view
of the cultural and social changes prevalent in Europe and throughout
the world. In his works he usually integrates biographical ingredients
such as photographs and documents, as well as diverse authentic,
reconstructed, or reprocessed objects. The works combine intellectual
ideas and philosophical theories together with the artist’s intimate
personal experiences.

The project he is presenting in the container in Haifa is connected to
his childhood memories of his father during the period when his father
was working in Israel. This was in the 1990s, when his father used to
send his son in Romania letters with photographs describing his
experiences of, and life in, Israel. Moldovan’s attachment to his
father was strongly linked to an attachment to Israel, to descriptions
of its landscapes, and to its cultural characteristics, as he read
about them in the letters and saw them in all the photographs his
father sent him. Even though his father’s living conditions were by no
means of a high standard (he was living in a caravan), the man
describes this period in a positive light and presents Israel as a
beautiful, enchanted place. Moldovan the son grew up impressed with
these descriptions and assiduously collected the pieces of information
and the items that were sent from Israel to Romania. In the
exhibition, Moldovan reconstructs his father’s room by means of
several available materials that he found such as cardboard boxes and
various panels, which he very carefully arranged, combining them with
original objects, letters, and his father’s authentic documents from
Israel. In the work of constructing the room, Moldovan tried to
recapture how his father had felt in Israel and by this means to
enable himself, too, to undergo the same feelings, to connect to his
father and to his experiences and childhood memories from that period.

catalog text