Thanks to the igneous stone scattered across the fourth floor of MNAC, as you explore this show you find yourself on uneven, uncertain ground which crunches under boot or shoe. Monitors, here and there, are like puddles of intrigue; some are suspended on near-invisible wire; and all screens feature looped black and white films of a young and plainly dressed woman – Nina – who performs a series of feats: she drives a car using the power of her mind; she appears to conduct the wind as it sweeps across a field of corn; she summons a pulsating ball of white light and sends it into the air. Whatever trickery is employed here, the show invites you to pretend this reconstruction is documentary.
Nina Kaluguri was a twentieth century housewife in Soviet Russia who achieved celebrity on account of her reputed psychic gifts. The USSR may not have ‘won the space race’. But there might have been covert and successful developments within inner space. The US made similar efforts with a programme called Stargate, but that is said to have been a relative failure. But the western imagination, on the other hand, is primed to accept the reality of Nina’s gifts; that is, the show immediately made me think of Stalker by Russian director Tarkovsky. Very obvious and perhaps the truth.
In an audio work that accompanies this theatrical set up, the artist, Adina Mocanu, refers to spoon bending and the levitation of furniture as ‘energy work’. Nina, a celebrity as well as a homemaker, had real work to do for an ideological cause. Her profession, as psychic housewife, was as noble as that of a cosmonaut, as matter of fact as that of a factory worker, miner, farm worker, or politburo member. As a subject, she allows Mocanu to harness both Utopian thinking and an innocent sense of possibility.
In 2024 we find ourselves with a reheated Cold War, one in which socialist ideals appear to play little part. I don’t know the current state of Energy Work Studies in the corridors of many a Kremlin-backed university. But I do know that we need new beliefs and fast. A long-playing audio work here concludes with an invitation to believe in the power of imagination: imagination can conjure telekinetic results and it can (surely, somewhere, somehow, once again) conjure a perfect world. I was also put in mind of a Shakespearean exhortation from one of his more enigmatic plays, The Winter’s Tale. As Paulina welcomes the court of Sicilia, before attempting the reanimation of an art exhibit based on Queen Hermione, she silences those present with the words “Awake your faith”.
By layering materials and exercising her own imagination, in depth, via a range of media, the Romanian artist gives a contemporary reality to Nina and her gifts. She has produced a suite of fourteen drawings, in which Nina performs her impossible acts. They are monochrome and swiftly descriptive, as if a group of scientists were looking over the artist’s shoulder and supervising. There is also Enigma, a 36-page magazine which purports to be a special edition filled with sightings of Nina. The fantastical eyewitness accounts are all the work of Mocanu. Three of Nina’s dresses are presented as relics, invoking her presence as the wire on which they hang slowly rotates. A maquette of a Bucharest block of flats is inlaid with a screen on which we concentrate on the face of Nina, or her double. The double, who is a fictional reincarnation of NIna said to live in a village in Romania, may or may not be touched by madness.
But out of this realm of chaos, mystery, fear, vision, and apocalyptic fervour – all of which are for me manifested at any time by any venture beyond what gives as reality in official circles – Mocanu has created a cool, objective, cohesive show which pits the modest figure of a real life woman called Nina against Cold War-era imperialism, against (I want to say) Neo-Liberaral colonisalism, and surely bestows upon her – and us – the hope of a resurgent interest in the potential not just of the mind but of progressive ways of living, or thinking. Faith can after all move plenty.
This is a review of an exhibition at MNAC, Bucharest, which ran between 13 June and 10 November 2024.