BIO
Tania Șimoca (b. 1995, Zalău, Romania) is a contemporary artist with a background in painting from the University of Art and Design Cluj-Napoca and is currently pursuing a master’s degree at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp.
The body of her work aims to reproduce and describe momentary states, uncertain, ambiguous spaces, depicting different atmospheric situations that are attributed to individual’s everyday scenarios. Life journeys or imaginary ones, the places one resides in, the way we are transforming the place and vice versa are some ideas that revolve around her work. These places can be a daydreaming setup, a spiritual
one or, finally, undesirable one, and the ideas can be linked to everyday situations happening around the globe.
While the genesis of her works for this project begins with the interest in dance choreography and scenography, nonetheless, it extends upon G. Bachelard’s ideas on space, but in the end it remains just an empty stage or a white screen, excluding the human presence from the set-up. Through these sculpture-like forms, a motif that occurs repeatedly, it appears the tendency of converting these shapes into animated objects that replace the human presence, illustrating only an allusion of it or becomes part of the scenery.
The subject and the ideas above mentioned can be conected with Ursula K. Le Guin The carrier bag theory of fiction. Le Guin tells the story of the container, our ancestors’ greatest invention. If we think of spaces, places we all built for us, to live and store things in, to have a place we can call home, a place where we share and collect emotions, then we can obviously see the association with Le Guin’s carrier
bag theory.
If it is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it’s useful, edible or beautiful, into a bag, or a basket, or a bit of rolled bark or leaf, or a net woven of your own hair, or what have you, and then take it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people, and then later on you take it out and eat it or share it or store it up for winter in a solider container or put it in the medicine bundle or the shrine or the museum, the holy place, the area that contains what is sacred, and then next day you probably do much the same again – if to do that is human, if that’s what it takes, then I am a human being after all. Fully, freely, gladly, for the first time.
CV
Group exhibitions:
2024 – Unveiling the traces of my own shadows, Himera x Jecza Gallery, Timisoara, RO
2024 – Printed Image, Lange Zaal – Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, Antwerp, BE
2023 – Everything Flows, Atelier Jacques Gorus, Antwerp, BE
2023 – TickerTape-Parade // Antwerp Art Weekend, Antwerp, BE
2023 – Le plus fins du siecle, NTT DATA Romania, Cluj-Napoca, RO
2022 – Spectre, The Cosmic House Gallery, Cluj-Napoca, RO
2022 – PLUSSING, WARP Contemporary Art Platform, Sint-Niklaas, BE
2022 – Crama Oprișor Awards for Contemporary Drawing, The Art Museum of Cluj-Napoca
2021 – 2022 – Benefit for Brabant, Albert van Abbehuis, Eindhoven, NL
2021 – ArtEindhoven, Klokgebouw, Eindhoven, NL
2020 – Diploma Festival 7, Combinatul Fondului Plastic, Bucharest, RO
2020 – Alumni Show, University of Art and Design Cluj-Napoca, Cluj, RO // Online exhibition
Solo exhibitions:
2022 – Temporary exhibition//The Plinth, S.M.A.K. Gent, BE
2019 – ‘Turnhout Series’, Cultuurhuis de Warande, Turnhout, BE
Publications
2024 – /The world pulse beats beyond my door, self-published, Antwerp, edition of 3
2024 – Printed Image vol. 2, Splinter, Antwerp, BE // in the context of Printed Image exhibition
