I was familiar with much of Ioana Nemeș’s work before arriving at the MNAC exhibition, where I was more curious about how it was framed within the broader context of her linked interests in sports, fashion, entertainment, and theory. I was prepared to discover some lesser-known works, and perhaps more of the behind-the-scenes of her prolific artistic production. Or so I thought. However, the big surprise came with the works I knew best from her practice, Monthly Evaluations (2004–2010), with its sub-series, Time Exposure, Vanishing Point, Travel, and the eponymous Monthly Evaluations marked with a specific date. Seen together, in such large numbers and on such a large scale, the works in this series, visited at a time when I was rereading my own journal, led me to a new perception of the very idea of time.

Ioana Nemeș transformed her journal into a calibrated, almost scientific instrument. Every month, and sometimes every day, Ioana translated life experiences into a system of numbers, codes, and colours, a kind of abstract file measuring professional development, emotional stability, intelligence, luck, and financial situation, two decades ahead of the journaling apps that abound today. The result is a language that is precise in structure but opaque in meaning to anyone outside her inner logic, presented on an entire wall (in which the white wall itself is a much-theorised presence throughout the history of contemporary art), thus bringing an impossible-to-ignore physical presence to the exhibition space. The scale gives each abstracted diary page a monumental weight, as if life itself could be fixed in space and measured precisely from a distance.

The works generate a sense of infinite presence: month after month, always measurable, always contained, a sensation reinforced by the artist’s early death. An interrupted rhythm, but one that continues to suggest a possible infinity.

My journal is the polar opposite. It is not an orderly grid of colors and metrics, but an ever-expanding Word document that stretches in all directions. There is only one starting point, in the summer of 2006, when I started working on a laptop. My journal operates without margins or final pages, growing in bursts, especially in the quiet hours of the night, when I cannot sleep because something (or someone) has disturbed me. It is not a journal meant to be gazed at from a distance, either temporal or personal (I hope I will have the lucidity to delete it someday). Sentences flow and fall apart. Arguments repeat themselves in loops. The same questions reappear months later, phrased differently or uncomfortably similarly each time. This archive has become so long and tangled that I can only navigate it using the “find” function. I rummage through it looking for places and times connected by a name, a piece of clothing, a clue. I rely on my own memory to revisit my memories. I read this document and realize how nonlinear, even virtual, the past is. I arrive at different moments in time much like entering rooms in a dream, without knowing how I got there.

Unlike Ioana Nemeș’ large-scale installations, which gave each moment in time a physical, tangible body, my diary has no surface. It cannot be touched or measured on a wall; it exists only as digital data, something that could disappear in an instant if I deleted or lost the file. An intangible presence floating somewhere between the cloud and my sometimes sleepless mind.

If Ioana Nemeș’s works distilled experience into a visible and public structure, my diary leaves it raw and private, buried in the digital clutter I will probably struggle with for the rest of my life. Her method produces a sense of control, of time frozen in place by a precise system; mine rejects control, accumulating without any organising principle, a chaos in which I find myself constantly without being able to fully comprehend it.

Analysing the two journals in parallel, I understand them as two fundamentally different ways of struggling with time and the self. Hers: structured, architectural, suggesting a continuous horizon, a self that is always here, a continuous present. Mine: restless, wandering, a huge archive of what has already slipped through my fingers, a record of always being after, a continuous past.

“Ioana Nemeș. All Times At Once”. Curator: Kilobase Bucharest [National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest, 12.12.2024–19.04.2025]